


relationship_advice

by briarcreature, shellcollector



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, COVID-19, Historical Setting: April 2020, Illnesses, Multi, Suicidal Ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-09-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:47:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,502
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25921555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/briarcreature/pseuds/briarcreature, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shellcollector/pseuds/shellcollector
Summary: April 2020 finds the JBM household quarantining together with six cats and one surprise guest.
Relationships: Joly/Bossuet Laigle/Musichetta
Comments: 70
Kudos: 29





	1. My (25M) housemate (27M) does not pay any rent or bills, has broken most of my household appliances, and last night had sex with my girlfriend (24F)

**Author's Note:**

> The characters in this have modernised/Anglicised names, largely because it was fun coming up to them but also in part because we wanted to retain the punning character of some of the original names. If you're struggling with who's who, there's a cheat sheet at the end.

Joel Lee hummed a happy little tune to himself as he wrapped copper tape around the handle of the new kettle. Things were going, all things very much considered, well. Boswell and Etta were still asleep, but the cats had Joel on a tight schedule, and if he didn’t feed them as soon as they started climbing on him then Lister (the hairless one, and secretly Joel’s favourite, although he tried to ensure that they all felt equally loved) would sit on Boswell’s head again and do The Thing. They were still eating now; over his humming he could hear the sound of six sets of little jaws contentedly making their way through six bowls of wet food. 

In general, Joel had been a fan of Going Out. It had been really fun, in the Before Times (he kinda liked calling it that, in his head; it reminded him of a science fiction book, or something), to go to a party or a bar and get drunk and feel warm and safe and walk home with Boswell in the small hours of the morning just as the sun was coming up, and hear the birds start to sing and think: this is good, life is good. To be honest, he’d thought he’d miss it more. But he was really getting into the swing of staying home as well. There was a nice rhythm to his day: get up, feed the cats, put last night’s sourdough in the oven, take his temperature, breakfast, check the mutual aid group messages, online lecture, study, take Boswell’s temperature, lunch, start the next day’s sourdough, online lecture, study, knead the sourdough, zoom call, dinner, watch some Netflix or play a board game maybe, take temperatures again, bed. Sometimes there was sex in there, too. Saturdays, he was in the hospital’s Covid test lab. It didn’t feel like much, when Cam had taken early graduation and was working full time on a ward, but Joel was only in his M1, and even though replenishing his gut bacteria was going well he still got tired real easy. Sometimes he spent all Sunday on the couch recovering with Etta and Boswell and the cats. That was pretty good too.

Breakfast was a tempeh tartine with pickles, washed down with some pineapple kefir. He’d been off coffee again for the last three months, but he made himself a lemon balm and ginger tea with a shot of apple cider vinegar. Someone on the next street over needed groceries, so he put out a call for volunteers to pick them up. If nobody else offered he knew Boswell would go, but he kinda hoped that wouldn’t happen because honestly, it made him nervous to send Boswell out with his card. It would be a dumb time to get arrested for credit card fraud, and Boswell had a knack for doing things like that at dumb times. Thinking about Boswell in a jail made his heart race, so he made another lemon balm tea, but with chamomile this time. 

He really wished Etta would let him monitor her temp too, but she had said No in that way that meant it was a Boundary and she’d get really mad if he pushed her on it. It was weird having her there all the time. Good weird. Another thing he appreciated about the current situation was that he knew Boswell wasn’t going to take off and stay with someone else for a few days, which he always said was to give Joel a chance to study. Joel had never gone so far as to ask him not to do that; he’d never been certain enough that Boswell didn’t just need the space. But it was good, having him there. 

He settled himself down at his desk to work, and as usual the cats trailed after him. Potato mewed at him, so he gave her a boost up to the table, where she curled up on his renal physiology textbook and fell asleep. He stroked the tips of her ears and gave her some scritches at the base of the stub that had once been her tail, while testing himself, once again, on the complement cascade; he always seemed to get lost somewhere around the splitting of C3. 

Then his phone rang. It was Barry O’Reilly. Joel really didn’t like disrupting his schedule — and he really did need to get the complement cascade into his head somehow — but he always worried that one day he’d refuse a call and it would turn out that his friends were in a serious emergency, and maybe if he didn’t pick up, whoever it was wouldn’t be able to get through to someone else, and maybe they’d end up horribly injured or get another really unwise tattoo. So he answered.

“Joel!” Barry looked and sounded as exuberant as ever. He was wearing two black sweaters, a lurid hawaiian shirt over the top of the sweaters, a fluorescent pink bobble hat, and a neon scarf. Somehow the whole outfit came together really well. Maybe it was the green beard that made it work.

“Hi Barry,” said Joel, “Is this urgent, because I’m supposed to be studying, and —”

“Studying!” said Barry, indignantly. “Let me tell you, Joel, that whole business is a scam. What happened to the simple joy of knowledge? Why schedule that and turn it into something lifeless and obligatory? I’ve read three books since yesterday evening — two overnight and one this morning, since you ask — but that wasn’t studying. That was living.”

“Right,” said Joel. “Okay. Is there anything you need?”

“I need a lot of things, most of which I’m unlikely to get for some time,” said Barry, whose head was bobbing up and down; Joel realised that he was pacing on the spot as he talked. “I need other humans. Many other humans, not just Jean, delightful though he is. I need movement, I need excitement. I need my landlord to be strung up from a lamppost. Make that all landlords.”

“Oh no!” said Joel. “What’s he up to now?”

“Oh, the usual bullshit. My phone’s full of quote unquote warnings about how it’s not a live-in studio so it’s officially closed during lockdown and he sure hopes nobody is in there.”

“Wait, do you think he knows you’re living there?”

Joel had always been gently astonished by the fact that Barry O’Reilly and John ‘Jean Prouvaire’ Prover had managed to spend the last three years living in Jean’s non-residential art studio. He was pretty sure that the anxiety about getting caught would have destroyed him within a week.

“He’s always known,” said Barry, “Of course he has. He’s just never been able to prove it. Now he’s got overexcited and decided this is his hour, thinks he’s on fuckin’ CSI. He keeps threatening to drop in. Total bullshit of course, aside from anything he’d be the one breaking quarantine rules if he drove down here. Let’s not talk about him, he’s an absolute scumbag and even thinking about him gets me down. How are you?”

“Really great, actually,” said Joel. “I really like having Etta here.”

“Good for you! Now, you make sure you give her space. Let her have time to herself.”

“Yeah, I’m studying a lot of the day, so when she’s not hanging out with Boswell she gets a lot of reading done. And writing, I think she said she’s working on another chapbook.”

“Good, good. And you’re keeping ahead of the chores, like I said?”

“Yeah.”

“Nothing’s going to turn her off faster than making her feel like she’s your mom and she’s gotta clean up after you. I like the t-shirt, by the way, it fits you well.”

“Thanks! It’s one of my favourites. Hey, uh, Barry, look, it’s been really great talking, but would you be okay with, I mean —”

“Ha! You need to get back to studying. Of course. Well, I may not approve, but I hope you do well. You’re gonna be a good doctor.”

“Thanks. I keep getting stuck on this one bit of immunology, it’s getting me down a bit.”

“Just remember why you’re interested in this in the first place. Don’t let the exams and the flashcards and the bullshit take you away from that. You think the human immune system is cool?”

“Oh, yeah! It’s amazing, it’s just so complex —”

“Well, let yourself get a bit excited about it. You can’t just let yourself see a bunch of diagrams. Think about the beauty, the drama. I’m assuming there’s drama.” 

“Oh, tons of drama. Thanks, Barry. That helps, actually.”

“Okay, I’m gonna let you get back to it. Speak soon, yeah? Don’t be a stranger.”

“Yeah. Take care.”

Joel did feel a little bit better about complement now, so that was good. Potato purred at him and he rubbed her head. He looked over at the rest of the cats. Wavy and Wheels were having a somewhat unorthodox play fight on the rug; Lady Chatterley was washing herself daintily. Childe Harold was under the sofa again, but when their eyes met he gave a couple slow blinks, so Joel wasn’t too worried about him. He couldn’t see Lister, though, which was a bit concerning, as it suggested that he’d made it back into the bedroom and was probably right now doing The Thing.

Joel sighed. He really didn’t want to get derailed from working any further, but his beloved - one of his beloveds - needed his aid, and he could hardly stand by. He only hoped he’d get there in time. 


	2. My (27M) boyfriend (25M) does all of the food shopping and will not buy or prepare anything that isn't pickled/fermented/sprouted

Louis “Boswell” Laskin had low standards for what counted as an auspicious start to the day, but in a general way he had preferences. He liked being woken up by Joel with an excited glint in his eye that spoke of some new scheme. He liked it when Etta woke him up for sex. He liked waking up slowly and lazily under his own steam. He didn’t like waking up with a hangover, but taking a step back he could see that his own actions indicated that he must not hate it all that much, either. He didn’t like the jolt of an alarm clock, but insofar as it was a part of the whole capitalism package he allowed his objections to it to be subsumed under his general beef with said package, which was substantial but also something he was acting upon. What he’d always found it hardest to reconcile himself to was being woken up by the very distinct sensation - one he was now able to recognise even from the depths of slumber - of a hairless cat humping the side of his head while it farted in his ear. 

He blinked his eyes open just as Joel, wearing his black tshirt with a white anatomical diagram of a heart on it (a contributing factor in Etta’s believing he was an artsy goth for the first three weeks of their relationship) and one of his more concerned expressions, came in through the door on tiptoe. His eyes met Boswell’s.

“Oh, shit,” he said, in a low whisper. “I’m too late. I was hoping I could rescue you.”

“You can still rescue me,” Boswell pointed out, also speaking gently. Lister the cat, trembling with pleasure, let another really big one rip; it seemed to rattle in Boswell’s eardrums. 

“I very much need rescuing,” he whispered.

Joel gently lifted Lister away from Boswell’s skull. 

“I really thought we’d turned a corner with the new food,” he said. He held Lister tenderly, petting him under his chin. Lister leaned into his shoulder, purring and farting. 

“We’re gonna have to give you another probiotic!” Joel said. “Yes we are! Yes we are!”

Boswell hauled himself up in bed. Etta was still asleep on her side, a pale tattooed arm resting outside the covers. 

“You want coffee?” asked Joel. 

“Nah,” said Boswell. “I’ll make my own. You get back to work. You want some tea?”

Joel rubbed at his nose. “Kinda, if you’re putting the kettle on.”

Just at the end of February, Boswell had finally got what seemed like a half decent job, as a tour guide around the city center and a couple of the big museums. His boss was chill, the job paid cash, and talking about old buildings and/or old pots hardly even felt like work. Some of the tourists tipped surprisingly generously. He was looking at finally being able to help Joel out with the rent, was considering getting some new shoes. It unsettled him that his personal jinx, which had previously confined itself to small-potatoes stuff like minor electrical fires or the incident with the moose, had apparently arranged a global catastrophe purely in order to stop him from purchasing sneakers. He’d got a very nice email from his chill boss, now sounding a great deal less chill, apologizing for his being ineligible for furlough and promising that when the tourist industry recovered, whenever that might be, he’d definitely be the first person they called.

He’d spent over a month now sending out job applications for jobs that didn’t actually exist, but was finding the motivation to do so increasingly difficult to access. All the same, with Joel and Etta close by and thankfully, so far, safe, Boswell would have had to make a significant effort to be actually unhappy, and he was philosophically opposed to such a use of his energy. Instead he directed it towards appreciation of the blessings surrounding him. For instance, Joel in study mode was really cute: rapt and still, even as he chewed on the end of a pencil. 

“You know,” said Joel, turning around, “I can feel it when you’re staring at the back of my head.”

“Ah, jesus, I’m sorry,” said Boswell. “Sometimes I just get consumed by a bitter envy for that scalpful of hair and I find it hard to concentrate on anything else.”

Joel rolled his eyes. “I think it’s time we took your temp.”

Possibly even cuter than Joel at rest was Joel’s solemn, anxious expression as he waited for the thermometer to beep.

“97.6,” he said, finally. He sounded relieved. 

Boswell kissed him.

“I’ll make lunch,” he said, feeling expansive. 

“Nope,” said Joel. “You absolutely will not.”

Thing was: Boswell really, really missed eating foods that weren’t sour. He couldn’t deny the slight shittiness of even having that preference, given that by all accounts Joel’s intestinal bacteria, energy levels and whole-body inflammation were never better. Moreover, since he’d been gently dodging the suggestion of a fecal transplant for about four months now, it seemed pretty unreasonable to reject the second-choice option as well. But Boswell was at a point where he desperately wanted to have, like, a plate of buttered noodles. 

Which was what Etta was eating right now. 

“Just give me, like, one,” he said. “One noodle.”

“Louis, sweetheart, I love you, but I’m not giving you my noodles just because you can’t tell Joel you don’t want to eat pickles any more. That’s exactly why I have my own food.”

“I used to get my own food, sometimes, before my card got flagged. Absolutely as soon as I get the name on the account and my ID to match up, I’ll be good for it. I’ll pay you back! I’ll buy you…. endless noodles. All the noodles you’ve ever dreamed of. You can bathe in a tub of noodles like Noodle Mc Fucking Duck.” 

“Okay, so here’s the thing: you could ask Joel for that and he’d get you your own tub of noodles, like, tomorrow.”  
“He’d look so sad, though.”

“Okay. Enjoy your pickles, then, I guess.”

“You don’t under—”

“Talk. to. him.”

He went and sat on the couch and scrolled through WhatsApp. Joel was asking around the mutual aid group about getting someone to do shopping, so he typed, _Hey Joel, I’m good to do this, as long as you can lend me your card?_

If he was honest, it was lowkey getting him down that he hadn’t had a bank account for going on six months now. He’d actually received his stimulus check, earlier than anyone he knew, but he didn’t have an account to pay it into, plus it was made out to “Louise Laskin”, which wasn’t even his deadname. His best reconstruction was that some helpful official had seen the gender marker on one of the databases where Boswell still hadn’t managed to get it changed, and decided that his actual, legal name must be a typo, which from one angle was an admirable approach to error correction and rationalization; he kinda wished that the person who set up his bank account in the name of “Louis Lashing” or the person who issued him state ID in the name of “Lewis Lakin” or the guy who printed his driver’s licence with “Lucas Laskim” had had a similar concern for precision, misplaced though it had been on this occasion. He almost hadn’t bothered making all those phone calls (futile, of course) to try to get it fixed, but there was that dream he had that wouldn’t die, the one of being able to pay Joel rent, and besides he didn’t like the way Joel got upset when he went out in the rain in his holey old shoes and came back with wet socks. 

On top of all this, he was also becoming concerned about getting under Joel’s feet when he was trying to work; usually he tried to give him a couple days’ peace whenever he could, but now he couldn’t even leave the house. 

Harper Kaysar had messaged him, and the thing about Harper was that he never sent just one message. On this occasion, it was ten increasingly confusing rants about the state of the US communications network, followed by five more in which Harper made dark intimations about dropping off the face of the world and never being seen again. After studying them for a while, Boswell eventually managed to decipher that Harper was unhappy with his wifi speed. 

_Wow,_ he texted back. _Real bummer. Especially rn. Let me know if there’s anything we can do to help._

He fetched himself an herbal tea and a raw probiotic cookie from the kitchen and tried to work himself up to having The Talk with Joel about groceries. Maybe, he thought to himself, maybe he could talk Joel into letting him do the whole grocery run this week, seeing as how it was totally absurd that Joel had to do that on top of everything else he had on his plate. Maybe he could pick up some food for their neighbour and some vegan hotdogs and actual, real bread. He’d clear that part with Joel, of course, but maybe Joel would find the whole thing easier if he weren’t the one putting toxic unsprouted grains into the shopping cart. 

He’d kind of talked himself around to this position by the time Joel’s next break — the full schedule was written up in different colours on a white-out board Joel had mounted on the living room wall — rolled around. He’d even psychologically steeled himself for Joel’s look of disappointment and concern. 

What he wasn’t prepared for, like at all, was Joel already looking somewhat agitated. 

“Shit,” he said. “What’s up?”

Joel had a distracted expression, as if he were listening for some faint background noise. “I feel weird.”

“Okay, what sort of weird?”

“My chest feels kinda tight, and there’s these little sort of, pinching sensations all the way through it.” Joel blinked and stepped back away from him. “Hey, just… keep your distance for now, okay? And can you go wash your hands after this?”

“You think…”

“Look, I’m not sure, not yet. I don’t even have a fever. But there’s something really weird about my breathing. Almost as if…well, I don’t know.”

“Okay, slow down,” said Boswell. “When did this start?”

“Maybe half an hour ago?”

“You been using your inhaler? Don’t you usually start on that at the beginning of April? So, like, two weeks ago?”

“Oh!” Joel rubbed his nose. “You know, it’s weird how time just —”

“Yeah. I know.”

“I never normally forget that. Jesus.”

“Hey, hey, it’s gonna be fine. And this is much less scary, right?”

He took a cautious step forward and gave a ‘hug?’ gesture; Joel certainly looked like he needed it. But Joel, looking concerned, stepped back. 

“Sorry,” he said. “I just think we should be careful, you know? I’m still not sure.”

“Okay. Let’s give it a couple hours. Can I get your inhaler for you now?”

Joel smiled, a little bit. “Yeah, thanks.”

“Think you need the blue one?”

“Maybe? God, I shouldn’t have let this happen.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it, really. This is going to be fine.”

“Oh, poor Joel,” said Etta. 

“Yeah. I think he’s okay, just a bit stressed out. I’m hoping once he’s breathing okay he’ll feel better.”

“No cough, right?”

“No cough, no fever.”

“Honestly, I think he’s been doing really well so far, considering everything.”

“Yeah.”

He rummaged through the nightstand drawer, looking for the inhaler. Or was it in the medicine chest? His phone buzzed. Then again. 

Yeah, there it was, at the bottom of the chest. His phone buzzed again. 

“Is that you?” asked Etta. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Thought it was on silent, but I guess not.”

He took the phone out to switch off the buzzer, and saw that Harper had messaged him back. Several times. Against his better judgement, he began to read. 

_You can't fix the appalling state of telecommunications in this country, and you can't wean me from my disgusting overreliance upon it. Sorry, Boswell, but the engine of late capitalist America is deaf, dumb, and blind. It's all algorithmic now, anyway. Algorithmic and viral. We're shambling towards ruin with nobody at the controls._

_Even if you were at the controls, what could you do to make the machine change its groaning, heaving course? You can't operate a credit card, my man. Sorry, but you know I speak the truth._

_Yesterday I saw this slug on the pavement, writhing around where they salted it, no hair, no shell, and it reminded me of you._

_Sometimes I wish I were a slug! They only have nine neurons. Simple, efficient, effective. Who needs more braincells. Who needs Twitter? I don’t. You don’t. The President probably does, and I’d like to see him shrivel up without it. Did you know all slugs are hermaphrodites? ‘Course you did, that’s the first thing everyone learns about slugs. Nine neurons, dick, vagina. Everything they need, right there. The shell is extra. Snails are just showing off. I hate snails. I hate pretensions. Slugs are perfect the way they are, and what do we do? We salt them. Poor little guys. Girls. Guy-girls._

_I’m going out to find another slug and I’m going to ask him what to do about the whole situation with my stupid janky wi-fi, NOT that I’m expecting an answer. Some writhing, maybe. Some undulations. But seeing his smooth, bare back might make me smile, and if not, they’ve kept the liquor store open. The government wants us all to be happy, and die. Fuck. What a time to be alive! Soon, I bet there won’t be any molluscs left on Earth at all._

_What are you guys having for dinner?_

_I’ll bring the beer._


	3. Lister

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Lister:** Hairless cat with bowel issues, male.  
> Expect further occasional bonus Cat Updates in between chapters.


	4. Guest (27M) sleeping on couch says he does not need sheets or a sleeping bag. I (24F) think this is gross.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Greg is an OC; don't get worked up trying to figure out which canon character he corresponds to.

Etta Musich was in Hell. Not sexy hell; there were no cenobites, no big-busted women rimming Satan’s asshole. Just boring, old-fashioned Bad Times hell.

This was what she was doing this afternoon, in Hell: explaining once again to Harper fucking Kaysar that no, he couldn’t leave the house for the third time that day, during a global pandemic, in order to “get some more beers”. Trying to talk to him about maybe, sometimes, washing his hands, and putting on her best customer service voice, which she hated _hated_ to use when nominally at home, to explain to him, as if he were a little kid, what washing your hands involved. Not actually, despite the deepest wishes of her heart, strangling him.

She’d tried repeatedly to pin down exactly why a guy with his own apartment in an expensive area of town needed to be staying with them at all, let alone for the last week, let alone not giving any indication of when or if he was planning to leave. He’d just turned up at the door with a six-pack of Genessee Cream Ale, and the most information she’d managed to extract since then, from either him or Louis or Joel, was that his internet router was broken, or something like that? Which really did not answer her original question, at all. Real talk: Joel’s one-bed, sweet though it was, had been kinda cramped, albeit in a cozy way, when it had three people and six cats in it full time. Now it had got to the point where there were, very clearly, too many beings trying to coexist inside its walls. She might have been able to deal with it psychologically if she’d been able to hide in the bedroom the whole time, but Joel was having a slow meltdown for which, fairly or not, she held Harper largely responsible, and was on-and-off commandeering the bedroom for himself so that he could ‘self-isolate’.

That meant the remaining three of them cramped into the living-room-and-kitchen space, Boswell and Etta sleeping on the floor and an armchair respectively; it did not seem to have occurred to Harper to offer up the couch. Then, during the day, the three of them trying to read or watch tv or, god knows, even work on shit, like that collection of poems she’d sworn she was going to produce by the end of lockdown, while distributed between the kitchen table, Joel’s desk (where everything was in meticulous order and could not be disturbed in case he had a panic attack), the armchair, and the aforementioned couch. Thus arriving at the the absolute worst part, which was that sitting on the couch meant you were unavoidably aware of the way it was starting to smell (bad) and, god help you, feel (greasy), after Harper slept on it night after night - and frankly day after day, he was never up before noon - without sheets or even fucking pillowcases. The first day, she’d helpfully left a pile of nicely laundered bedlinen near the couch, only to find them still there, untouched, the day after, and Harper sprawled across the sofa with a decorative throw blanket spread over him.

She’d tried the indirect approach — “Oh Harper, I probably should have said, these are for you,” — and the direct — “Hey Harper, do you mind putting a sheet and a pillowcase on the couch before you sleep on it? Thanks.” The first got her a leering grin, the second a shrug and a sullen, teenaged “Sure.” Neither resulted in any change in Harper’s behaviour.

Eventually, desperate and angry, she’d made up the bed herself, like a fucking maid, christ Harper had probably grown up with fucking maids hadn’t he, with his trust fund and the dad he swore hated him despite giving him a shit ton of free money; she’d give her right arm to be hated like that. It killed her that she’d broken one of her firmest rules — do not clean up after a guy unless it’s a paying job, and not ever at your boyfriends’ house — and he’d just thrown the pillows on the floor and slept on a pile of cushions. Then pulled the sheets off the next day to sit on the sofa and never once replaced them.

At that point she went out on a grocery run purely as an excuse to leave the apartment, breathed the sweet Harperless air through the mask Joel had insisted on, and came back refreshed and firm.

“Hey, Harper,” she said, hiding her anger and striving for absolute clarity. “We need you to put sheets on the couch before you sleep on it, and pillowcases on whatever you’re using as a pillow, or you’ll have to go back to your own place.”

“Huh?” said Harper, scratching at the oily roots of his hair. “Oh, yeah, sure. Whatever you want.”

The following morning she walked out into the living room and he was sleeping, once again, on a pile of uncased cushions, the same throw blanket over his damp, sour-smelling body. There was a dark patch of sweat on the back of the couch where his back had been pressed against it.

That was when Etta had thought most seriously about leaving. She was already furiously regretting her initial decision to spend lockdown with Joel and Boswell rather than in her own apartment with her own roommates. She loved both her partners very much, but they sucked at drawing boundaries, which was the kind of trait someone like Harper would always take advantage of, and she never would have given up the option of going back to her own space if it hadn’t been for the ache she felt at the thought of not touching them for months.

Thing was, she’d known when she made that call that it was more or less irrevocable, given that Flora was diabetic and Fish was on immunosuppressant drugs for her psoriasis. She couldn’t exactly waltz back in because she’d changed her mind, especially after Harper had been wandering in and out of Joel’s apartment for days and doing god even knew what while he was out.

She decided, then, to give up on trying to protect Joel’s couch — which was, after all, not her own couch; it stressed her out to sit on it but she’d have to deal with that — and concentrate on at least persuading Harper to follow basic measures to avoid spreading the virus.

Which still left her in Hell.

“It’s, like, totally a function of the carceral state,” Harper was saying. “This whole thing was predicted by Foucault, I mean you gotta hand it to the guy, he had this whole deal figured out: the total transplantation of morality into the zone of hygiene, displacing all responsibility for the protection of the populace entirely onto the individual - I mean am I responsible for this pandemic? Me? This is about a system, is what you maybe don’t grasp here Etta, a system that’s fucked, a system eating itself, and we’re allowing ourselves to get distracted and all anyone can think about is handwashing, policing each other, wagging fingers at each other; I mean I can’t say I’m surprised because of course we’re allowing that to happen, humans pretty much always allow that to happen, it’s like: shame on _you_ because you’re not wearing a mask, shame on _you_ because you haven’t washed behind your ears, shame on _you_ because you drink too fuckin’ much, because you’re stepping outside the zone of normative human behaviour, and everyone’s really enjoying this, like don’t think I can’t tell you’re really enjoying this — I saw Goody Harper with coronavirus — and naturally, it’s understandable because what else do you fucking have in your life right now, Etta, if it isn’t disapproving of me, what does any of us have, what joys are we permitted, the state won’t even allow us to leave our houses so we have to make our own fun, right? But the thing is, I recognize that, which means I’m not gonna take that joy away from you by just conceding to your demands, like if I did that you’d be totally fucked wouldn’t you because you’d have absolutely nothing left, right?”

Etta went into the bathroom and locked the door and screamed into a towel bale. 

When she’d calmed down marginally, she went out and stood in the stairwell of the apartment building and called Irma Boissy.

“Irma,” she said. “I know this sucks and you can totally tell me no, but can I come stay with you? I just really need somewhere right now, and Fish and Flora are too high risk for me to move back in with them. I’m losing my actual mind.”

“Oh, no, babe,” said Irma. “You know I’d absolutely love to quarantine with you, but I’m not in the city any more, I moved in with Greg.”

“Greg?”

“Oh my god! I forgot you haven’t even met him, you have to meet him. When this is over we’re absolutely getting together. He’s got a sheep farm.”

“For real?”

“For real! He’s like, a hot shepherd, and I think he might be my soulmate. But hey, I don’t want to talk about myself right now, you sound not okay. What happened? Are you safe right now?”

Etta sighed. “Nothing happened. I’m just going crazy is all.”

“What’s going on? Seriously I’m worried about you, I can hear in your voice that something’s really wrong. Did you fall out with one of your guys? Both of your guys?”

“I don’t actually know if I can talk about it. Can you just chat to me for a bit? Tell me about Greg.”

“Okay, sure, I hear you. Okay, so, Greg. I don’t even know how to tell you everything about him, but he’s so great, Etta, we’re living in the cutest little trailer on his uncle’s land. He only has two sheep right now, a boy and a girl, but you know what they say, you only need two, right? Pretty soon we’re gonna have adorable little baby lambs, it’s gonna be so cute I think I’ll die.”

“Oh wow, baby lambs, that sounds great,” said Etta, encouragingly.

“I know, right? I actually love it when a guy has dreams. And living on a farm has been so good for me, I feel so healthy, my skin is so much clearer, it’s like I’m actually glowing.”

It was difficult for Etta to imagine how Irma could have become somehow more beautiful, but she took her at her word. “I’m so pleased you’re happy,” she said.

“Seriously, I’m _so_ happy. I just can’t believe he’s this perfect and also this sexy, you have no idea. Actually, wait, I’m gonna send you a picture of him, I have this great one where he’s with the sheep.”

Having met quite a few of Irma’s boyfriends before, Etta suspected she did, in fact, have some idea. Still, she waited patiently for the picture. Eventually it came through. Greg, wearing a pair of overalls, was standing next to a pair of straggly-looking sheep, to whom he bore a striking resemblance. Even though Etta would never understand how Irma’s taste worked, she felt a pang of affection for Irma herself.

“He looks like a really sweet guy!” she said, sticking to the approximately true.

“Oh my god, Etta, he’s the absolute sweetest. I just love the way we’re in our own little bubble here, it’s like all the shit that’s happening barely exists, as long as we have each other.”

That was what, finally, did it. Etta felt the tears coming but it was too late for her to stop them.

“Hey,” said Irma gently. “Hey babe, I’m sorry. I guess I struck a nerve there.”

“I’m sorry,” Etta said, choking a bit. “It’s just… I mean, fuck. We had that. We totally had that, like, a week ago, and then fucking Harper turns up and I don’t understand why and instantly it’s an entire nightmare.”

“Wait — Harper? Like, Harper Kaysar? The Upper Case R guy?”

“He just turned up here, and I never let people get to me like this, I don’t understand what’s happening. But I don’t get it, Irma, I don’t get why he even needs to be here and he barely seems to shower and I can’t even get him to sleep in between sheets like a normal person and I think the couch is going to smell of him forever. It’s like, what is this, is it some kind of weird power play? Does he need to mark the entire apartment with his scent like he’s one of Joel’s sickly cats? Is he in some kind of fucked up psychosexual drama with himself where he can’t sleep on a pillowcase because he doesn’t feel like he deserves it? _Why doesn’t he ever stop talking?_ ”

She felt a little ridiculous but she was still crying, so.

“Okay,” said Irma. “So I’m going to tell you about something but first I need you to agree that you absolutely will not judge me.”

Etta hiccupped. “What are you even going to tell me that could possibly change anything about this?”

Sure, she was a little hysterical. It had been a long fucking week.

“You remember Bunny’s party, like, a year ago?”

And yeah, she remembered Bunny Stuart’s party, which had occurred back when people used to have parties, when you could hang out in a close, warm room with other people, dancing and hugging and talking and drinking. Bad triphop music played not quite loud enough, Bunny and Fish making out in a corner, Flora and her weirdly straightedge investment banker boyfriend, she could never remember his name, Carl? Charles? tenderly slowdancing. Joel and Boswell giggling together at a private joke and Etta suddenly filled with thankfulness, for both of them, all of them, for love and friendship. That party. It felt like a thousand years ago.

“So, I kind of hooked up with Harper. Or started to, at least.”

“Oh my god, Irma. You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

“I told you not to judge me!”

“Tough. I’m judging you.”

“Don’t judge me until the end, okay. Anyway, we were making out and then we went back to his place.”

“I’m fucking judging you so hard, you have no idea.”

“We get to the bedroom, things are getting kinda steamy, and that’s when I realise that there’s no bed. As in, not just no bed frame, no bed at all. No mattress, no comforter, no pillows. Just a huge pile of old clothes and towels, in like the middle of the room. So, naturally I’m like, what the fuck is this. And he says, it’s a nest and he sleeps in it.”

“A NEST”

“Yup. A nest. I kind of didn’t believe him so he showed me how he curls up in a ball in the middle and piles some of the clothes and towels on top of him. And that’s how he sleeps.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“I’m absolutely not. So I was wondering, as you can imagine, where we’re gonna fuck. And he says, in the nest of course.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes. So I thought: well, okay, I’m gonna give this a shot.”

“You fucking. What.”

“Look, the thing you need to understand is, he’s got a kind of raw animal magnetism about him that’s pretty sexy.”

“Irma, no.”

“It is what it is, I just didn’t realise at first that the animal in question was a fucking hamster. But by that point I was really in the mood. So I crawled into the middle of the nest with him and we sort of made out for a bit, but I gotta tell you, I felt uncomfortable. And it smelled.”

“Jesus, Irma.”

“And I was like, okay we’re done here. Which he was a real pissy baby about. And I went home. The point is, I’m telling you this somewhat humiliating story to maybe put the couch thing in a kind of perspective.”

“I mean it sort of does, but also… a nest? A _nest?_ ”

“A nest. There you go. It’s my gift to you.”

When she got back in, Louis greeted her at the door.

“Hey,” he said gently. “You okay?”

She buried her face in his shoulder, gripped him a little too tight. He held her. He smelled good.

After a bit she realised that the living room was suspiciously empty.

“Where’s Harper?” she asked.

“I ran him a bath,” said Louis. “He’s still in it.”

She still didn’t get why Harper couldn’t run his own fucking bath, but at this point she was grateful for anything that meant him being somewhat degreased.

“How’s Joel doing?”

“We’ve talked it through, and he’s gonna get another test in the morning, in case the first one was too early for him to have a proper viral load, or something. I think he’s a bit calmer, anyway. You can probably go talk to him if you both wear masks.”

“I really love you,” she said, and then, “Irma found a new guy.”

“Oh yeah?”

“He’s a sheep farmer. A wannabe sheep farmer. He looks a lot like a sheep. She’s really happy.”

“Good for her.”

“I really want things to be back to normal, you know.”

He did that thing with his face, the one where he twisted it up into a smile as if he couldn’t allow himself himself get properly sad.

“Yeah,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The inspiration for Harper's nest is [this (tragically deleted by mods) relationship_advice thread](https://www.removeddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/hiqw9u/my_24_f_boyfriend_25m_sleeps_in_a_nest_of_clothes/).


	5. Lady Chatterley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Lady Chatterley:** blind white longhair, very elegant; female.


	6. AITA for tattooing a friend on a couple of occasions? We were both drunk and he was fine with it but seemingly now I’m the bad guy.

Harper Kaysar (“The Upper Case R guy”) was not a patient man. He would have been the first to admit it; Harper had, he felt, if nothing else, an exquisite awareness of his many, many, many personal failings. For his whole life, everyone around him had been all too ready to dig into them at length. “Harper, if you just sat still and paid attention, and didn’t give up the first time you got a problem wrong, you’d be fine at math.” “Harper, can’t you wait your turn for a few minutes?” “Harper, stop interrupting me.” “Harper, try to stay sober until 5 PM, okay?” “Harper, you need to try harder.” “Harper, you’re going to get gingivitis if you don’t start flossing.” Jesus Christ, even the dentists were in on it!

Yes, Harper would’ve had to have been as bad a special needs case as one of Boswell and Joel’s cats to make it to the old age of twenty-fuckin’-seven without understanding, and being able to laugh at, his vast collection of flaws, including a pronounced Lack Of Patience (and Also Tact). This congenital impatience made it all the more impressive, when you sat and thought about it, that he had been able to put up with Boswell and Joel’s mutual girlfriend for this long.

Maybe it was a female thing, this obsession with sheets and cleanliness and “real bedding”. Maybe that was it. It would explain why all the women Harper took back to his apartment— which, fine, was only two (2) women over the five (5) years he’d lived there— balked when he introduced them to the nest. The handful of guys he’d taken back to his apartment, on the other hand, didn’t give a fuck about his nesting habits. They, like Harper, had been there to party, which in this case meant “suck each others’ dicks”. (Harper wasn’t gay. He just wasn’t picky.) Conclusion: clearly your human females couldn’t just focus on the mind-annihilating, blissful experience of sexual pleasure; they also needed everything to smell like woodland glade laundry detergent. They wanted mattresses and starched pillowcases. Probably it wasn’t endemic to the fairer sex, Harper allowed. Most things weren’t. People were all pretty much the same when you got down to it. Probably it only came from decades of inescapable social conditioning aimed at brainwashing them into perfect spic-and-span little housewives. They couldn’t help it, any more than men could help wishing their sons would cut their hair and go out to the shooting range with their uncles every once in a while. (Harper cut his hair when it started to bother him too much, but he wouldn’t hold a gun if you paid him to do it, fuck no, never.)

Anyway, the point was, Etta Musich had been weird at him since he’d arrived at Joel and Boswell’s place. It wasn’t even like it was her apartment. She had her own! What’s more, she lived with two other chicks! She never had to worry that nobody’d be there to help if she dropped a plate on the floor, and it shattered, and one of the sharp, broken pieces…somehow…found its way to a major vein or artery or whatever, and sliced it right the fuck open, geysering her lifeblood across the walls. If her router went down, she had people to talk to.

So then: they were pretty much on an equal footing, Etta and Harper. Or they should’ve been. She was Boswell and Joel’s girlfriend, and Harper was their best friend. There wasn’t much of a difference, as far as Harper was concerned. Well, he’d never fucked Joel, and Boswell was just a one-or-two-time thing back in community college. But besides fucking, they were for all intents and purposes in the same boat. Neither had more of a right to be there than the other.

Etta sure acted like she did, though. She kept giving him persnickety, hyper-critical lectures about his hygiene, even though Joel and Boswell obviously didn’t care if he went out to get beer, or if his hair was a tad oily. Which would have been all right, actually, if the lectures had been the whole of it. Harper, as previously established, knew how to deal with lectures. In fact, he sort of enjoyed the chance to argue his own point, to make his logic known. Harper tended to win arguments, if it counted as winning when the other person gave up the fight and switched to pointedly ignoring you. But the lectures were really just the tip of the tiny, immovable iceberg that was Etta Musich.

All day long, from day one, she’d been giving Harper the stink-eye. She glared at him no matter where he sat or what he did or what he was talking about or how friendly he was towards her. Glared and sighed, like his presence was just the worst torture in the fuckin’ world, like he was a cenobite flaying her alive as she sat curled across the living room from him in the chair where she slept.

Harper could tell she had some passive-aggressive beef with him for not offering her the couch to sleep on, just like she had a beef with him for not wanting to dirty up Joel’s sheets and make extra laundry for his friends when he was fine with just the couch cushions and the afghan. Thing was, though, 1.) Boswell had offered Harper the couch on the night he arrived, fair and square; II.) Boswell and Etta could have slept with Joel in the bed if they’d really wanted to; everybody, probably including Joel, knew he wasn’t actually sick with the coronavirus; and C.) given that Etta and Boswell were indulging Joel’s hypochondria, the current sleeping arrangement made the most logical sense. Harper was a short dude, but Etta was, like, a fuckin’ munchkin. She was the only one who’d be comfortable folded up in that chair all night, no matter how plush it was. And God knew Harper would have preferred to switch off between the couch and the floor with Boswell, he wasn’t some kind of monster, he didn’t want good old Louis Laskin to bruise his pitiful cueball head on the cold, hard boards, but when he’d suggested this plan to Boswell, Boswell had wrinkled his nose a bit and smiled and said, “That’s okay, Upper Case R. You keep the couch. I have a sleeping bag.”

So it was all Boswell’s idea, really. But was Etta mad at Boswell? Nope! In Princess Etta’s eyes, Harper was the jerk in this situation, and Harper would be the jerk in every situation unless maybe Boswell, or Joel, or Boswell and Joel could talk some sense into her. Tell her how unfair she was being. Harper knew Boswell, at least, was up to the challenge; he was always so good at convincing people to do things. Harper knew that better than almost anybody. Boswell had just convinced him to take a bath, hadn’t he? 

Finished with his petition, Harper dunked his head beneath the grayish surface of the bathwater. When he came up, Boswell was still lounging thoughtfully against the sink. “So that’s why you wanted me to talk to you in here,” he said. “I thought maybe I was going to have to wash you like one of the cats.”

“Nah. I can scrub my own dick.” Harper picked at a zit or something like one on his wet shoulder. “This is just the only place we can get some goddamn privacy.”

“Gee. Maybe you should spend more time in the bathroom,” said Boswell, admirably straight faced. Harper gave him the finger.

“So. Boswell. My stalwart companion. Dear old friend. What do you say?”

“I can talk to her,” said Boswell, slowly. “But I really do think it would help things a lot if you’d, well, consider her position, too. Compromise a little. Take a few more baths, use the sheets. Joel and I really don’t mind the extra laundry at all.”

“Your mouth says one thing,” Harper intoned gravely. “But your eyes tell a different tale. I know you too well, dude. Hey, could you beer me again?” He held out a dripping hand and wriggled his fingers. Boswell examined the six-pack on the top of the toilet tank.

“How are you on your third bath beer already? You’ve been in the tub for like twenty-five minutes.”

Harper laughed. “I’m a fuckin’ machine, that’s how. Beer me, Laskin!”

Boswell complied, and took a beer for himself as well. They chugged in companionable silence for a few seconds. Harper thought about putting soap on his feet. His toenails were, like, black. Pretty gnarly. Fuck it, his feet were all the way over there, at the other end of him. Who looked at feet, anyway, except Tarantinoesque pervs? Harper wasn’t trying to attract foot fetishists. He looked farther up his legs, which were dimmed by the dirty water. They weren’t terrible legs. Even Etta couldn’t possibly have anything against his legs. He examined the upside-down tattoos he’d given himself when he’d still had the apprenticeship. God, those were pathetic. He sucked at tattooing.

Harper drank some more beer.

“You don’t suck at tattooing,” said Boswell, encouragingly. Apparently, Harper had been saying his thoughts out loud again. Boswell rubbed the bald top of his head. “I like the ones you’ve given me.”

“Yours are better,” said Harper. “You inspire me, Boswell. You’re just a big, blank canvas, waiting for the touch of a master artist. I become a master artist when the needle hits your flesh. I could tattoo hair on your head. I could tattoo hair made of spaghetti on your head. You make that shit possible. I could give you another Garfield for hair.”

“Etta and Joel would never look at me again, unless I was wearing a hat.”

“Or a toupee. A rug. Fuck them, though, seriously. They have no vision at all. No understanding of post-postmodern extremely online meme culture. The dada of our times. They’re just not as cool as us.”

“Not as irony-poisoned, you mean.” Boswell chuckled.

“I wish I’d brought my kit!” Harper exclaimed suddenly, half-getting out of the bath, then remembering where he was, that he was naked, and that he hadn’t finished the beer yet, and sitting down again with a shlorp! of tepid water. “Maybe I can go back and get it tomorrow. I’ll give you some new ink! I haven’t drawn a fuckin’ thing in, like, three months, man. It’s time. I’m telling ya, it’s time. My fingers are going to wither into decrepit little claws and fall off at this rate.”

“Oh, uh, R,” Boswell looked uncomfortable, which for Boswell meant that his smile wasn’t as broad as usual, and his posture was just a little bit less louche.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about this. The going out. Now, don’t think I’m taking Etta’s side or anything—”

Shit. Boswell was totally about to take Etta’s side. Traitor. But then, wasn’t this all Harper deserved? Could he blame his old pal, really? Harper knew he’d been a burden. Even if Etta was overreacting, he knew. He was just a mass of writhing, hideous flaws sewn haphazardly into the vague, sad shape of a man. Sure, he could be fun for Boswell and Joel. Sure, they indulged him. Sure, he’d given Boswell some frankly brilliant tattoos. But in the end, Harper Kaysar could only ever be himself. He talked too much. He drank too much. Everyone thought he took too many risks. They got offended when he told them the truth about the world, about themselves, about himself. Everyone judged him for not doing more, for not running around trying to pretend life wasn’t a series of futile distractions on the long march into the grave, for not getting a job— shit, his dad was rich, and willing to send Harper money every few months to keep him away from the family home! What did he need a job for? That was capitalist, Protestant work ethic horse piss. But no matter how radical you thought you were, you internalized it anyway. Even he did. Even Boswell did. Just like he’d fallen for this hooey about personal responsibility and self-cloistering. Of course, anyone besides Harper would have been able to magnanimously defer to his friends’ fears, no matter how misplaced they might be. Look at how Boswell treated Joel, for Christ’s sake! If Harper were a good friend, he would have inferred Boswell’s real feelings long before he’d been forced to say anything about them. If Harper were a true friend, he would have stayed home to begin with. Home with the shatterable plates and the kitchen knife and the razors and the bottles of Tylenol and the sixth-floor window.

“—so, since you’re here, and you seem to want to stay here, it’s for the best if you, well, stay here,” Boswell was finishing. “That makes sense, doesn’t it? I know you’re not sick, and I know it’s unlikely that you, personally, will catch or spread the virus walking around by yourself, but it would make Joel feel a lot better. And it’d keep Etta off your back. Okay?”

Harper disconsolately finished his beer. “Sure. Whatever. No new tattoos for Boswell. Got it. Your loss, dude.”

There was a loud knock at the door, and both men jumped a little.

“Etta?” called Boswell.

“Oh, shit,” said Harper.

The knock came again, followed by a loud “Mow-WOW?” and the frantic scratching of small claws. This time, it was clearly the sound of a cat hurling its body awkwardly against the bathroom door in an attempt to gain entry.

“It’s just Wavy,” said Boswell.

“Well, have a fuckin’ heart,” said Harper, who was definitely not holding back tears. “Let him in!”

“You want to take a bath with a cat in the room?”

“Yes. Always. I love that derpy little asshole. He walks like a drunk dementia patient with a concussion. Hilarious. You gotta respect him— he has no idea he isn’t normal.”

“Hey, no skin off my nose if you want to be damp and covered in cat hair,” said Boswell, and he went to open the door.


	7. Wave Function Collapse

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Wave Function Collapse, aka "Wavy":** small grey cat with feline cerebellar hypoplasia, male.


	8. My (25M) boyfriend's (27M) terrible tattoos of misshapen cartoon characters hitting fat blunts make it almost impossible to go down on him, yet he refuses to look into getting them removed or even just covering them up somehow

When Joel was feeling stressed, sometimes he just looked at cats for a while, and then he felt better. They were so entirely perfect. It was difficult to feel like the world had anything wrong with it that couldn’t be fixed when you were watching a cat sleep. The way their fur moved as they breathed; the way their little faces came to rest in a broad smile of contentment. It was good.

Even more comforting was watching their approach to solving problems. If they were uncomfortable, they moved. If they wanted something, they yelled plaintively at Joel until his heart melted and he gave it to them. They didn’t put up with things they didn’t like, but they didn’t get themselves tangled into knots over it either. Cats didn’t stay up all night reading about whether SARS-CoV-2 could cross the blood-brain barrier until Boswell got up to pee and saw the light on in the bedroom at three am and talked them into taking a diazepam.

Right now he was tired, and he didn’t know if it was Covid-19 or gut inflammation or just the fact that he hadn’t slept well for the last three or four nights at least. He didn’t like being alone in the bed, although there too the cats helped. He was trying to watch a video lecture — he was really behind on his studies, which was another thing to worry about — but every time he breathed in, he kept trying to imagine what his lungs would look like on an X-Ray. The words ‘ground glass opacities’ kept looping through his head like ticker tape. He’d get these waves of glittering, sharp pain through his chest: so mild they were barely even pain at all, but everywhere, like hundreds of tiny pinpricks as he inhaled, or the stings of microscopic ants. It almost reminded him a bit of the first time he’d tried weed, which hadn’t gone well, starting with the fact that inhaling it felt like breathing in something sharp and broken.

What he didn’t feel like he’d conveyed well to Boswell or Etta or anyone else was that it wasn’t even that he was afraid of having Covid, exactly; he didn’t _want_ Covid, obviously he didn’t, but what really destabilized him was not knowing what to make of things; having everything hang in superposition. If he had Covid, then his lung sensations were the virus travelling further into his bronchioles, and being in a room at all with someone else was fraught with danger. If he didn’t have Covid, then this was just another manifestation of his usual seasonal asthma, and he’d kicked Boswell and Etta out of the bed for — nothing? Surely not nothing; they had to be careful, didn’t they? 

Wheels had been running around all morning but now she had begun to flop exhaustedly to the ground, her pelvis and legs still propped up by the wheelframe. He pulled at the velcro to unstrap her from it and she butted her head against his hand. When he got back into bed, she dragged herself after him, grappling her way up the divan and comforter using only the strength of her front legs; he refrained from assisting her but reached over to cradle his hands behind her body so that if she fell he’d be able to catch her. Now on the bed, she flopped herself alongside him, pressing her back against his thigh, and purred furiously. He scratched under her chin and she tilted her head backwards so as to present her entire neck to his hand. Childe Harold was watching them both with interest from the top of the wardrobe.

Cats were very good.

There was a quiet knock at the door.

“I brought you some tea,” called Boswell.

Joel hastily donned a mask and sanitized his hands. “Thanks,” he said. “Come in.”

Boswell, masked, came in and set the cup down on the bedside table.

“You wanna check again to see if your results have come through?”

That was a ridiculous question; of course Joel wanted to check. He wanted to check every five minutes. The fact that he hadn’t done that was the result of sustained mental effort of which he felt, at least, a little bit proud. He nodded. Then opened up the window on his laptop to look, his heart pounding, definitely tachy, cold up his back, god why was it taking so long to load?

They both looked at the screen.

“Joel, this is good news, yeah?” said Boswell.

“Yeah.”

It was, of course. And even Joel couldn’t argue with two negative swabs, not really. But oh, he felt so tired, and now he had to shift gears from trying not to give anyone else Covid to trying not to get Covid, and all he wanted to do was sleep but he should probably be working right now —

“If for no other reason than the fact that I can kiss you now?” Boswell pulled off his own mask, seductively.

And it hit Joel, properly: he was fine, they were all fine (so far, at least); he didn’t have to keep anyone at arm’s length, he and Boswell and Etta and Harper could sit around in the evening drinking beers and enjoying each other’s company, he didn’t have to sleep alone, they could — Oh.

“I think I might take the afternoon off to celebrate,” he said.

Boswell pulled off Joel’s mask, even more seductively. “Good plan,” he said.

Joel had always really liked sex. Or rather, to be clear: yes, he enjoyed the experience of sex. But also, he was really glad about the Existence of sex. The fact that a human body had an extra kind of built-in enjoyment, that didn’t even require tools or extra materials. Just another human body or, in a pinch, itself. It was pretty neat.

Clearly it wasn’t the only important thing, and clearly some human bodies managed just fine without it. It wasn’t like people who didn’t like sex had anything missing. It was just a bonus, for him. A happy sort of accident, like the fact that sunsets were pretty and cats were really cute.

Sometimes it felt like his body was an overwhelmingly complicated mechanism, a dizzying array of buttons and dials, a puzzle he could never quite definitively solve. There was so much going on in there that he couldn’t see or even feel, so many systems interacting with one another, half of them still poorly accounted for even by the latest physiological research. Sex never felt like that, to him; it was just good, in a really straightforward way.

Or, mostly straightforward.

Here was the thing: he really, really liked giving Boswell oral. Boswell seemed to really like it when he gave him oral. It was a fun activity for all concerned. He also believed, very firmly, in Boswell’s right to make his own decisions re: his own body, over which he alone had sovereignty, et cetera. However, if he was honest, his heart had kinda sunk when he’d woken up one drizzly morning, the music of last night’s party still echoing in his mind, to find Boswell inspecting a really large tattoo, on his left inner thigh, of Garfield kicking back lazily while holding a smoking joint in one hand and a pineapple cocktail in another, an oversized baggie of mud-green leaf tucked under his arm. The line work was somewhat uneven; one eye in particular bulged alarmingly. All he could think of in that moment was the fact that he’d have to look at that thing every time he… yeah.

He’d tried to be supportive and positive, but sometimes Boswell was really good at filleting out his true feelings on a topic, however much Joel tried to conceal them.

“I mean, you gotta admit it’s really funny,” he said to Joel.

And Joel did have to admit, it was that. He had, furthermore, to admit that it was even funnier when, at the next party, everyone had gathered around to watch Harper inscribe Boswell’s right inner thigh with Garfield’s counterpart, a slightly cockeyed Snoopy, also toking a joint, although no cocktail this time; it seemed like Snoopy preferred his mind-altering substances one at a time, no interactions. After that, Joel had taken to hiding Harper’s tattoo kit every time they got drunk together. He sometimes woke in the middle of the night and got stuck worrying that Harper and Boswell would get together without him and Boswell would return with something inescapable, something on his face perhaps: Winnie the Pooh taking a piss, or a fucked up Mickey Mouse with hemp leaves for eyes. Sometimes he worried that he’d get drunk enough that it would be him next time, his medical career ended because of a South Park character huffing glue or doing a line of coke on his neck, just above where even the highest collar could conceal it. He’d worry that maybe even fearing this, focusing his mind on it, would turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, anchor it in his imagination so that when beer swept everything else away only that image would remain.

That hadn’t happened, at least not so far. And the thing with inner thighs was, well, they were kind of out of view a lot of the time, although admittedly you could sometimes see them through the holes in Boswell’s beloved decade-old pair of jeans. But even more, there was this: he loved all of Boswell, including his shaky drunk decision-making and his inclination to give people whatever they wanted, however unwisely (because Joel was no fool, and knew perfectly well whose idea it had been, on both occasions.) Etta had not spoken to Boswell for like, a week after the second tattoo, but Joel wasn’t angry. Sometimes it even made him tender, looking at them, in that soft place on Boswell’s thighs; there was a vulnerability to them, really. An honesty.

That said, they were really offputting when you were trying to suck someone off. You needed to take your glasses off and sort of make your eyes go out of focus, because if you let yourself actually register them, Snoopy and Garfield, both facing each other, except when you were between them that meant they were facing you — well, it put you off your game. Took you out of The Moment. He could make it work, he had a technique, but he wished it didn’t need to be this way.

Etta had, it turned out, spent her week away developing an elaborate theory that the tattoos were deeply symbolic, an act of reclamation and defiance in the face of oppressive aesthetic standards and the power of the universe, and that this was likely connected in some way to the trans thing and the luck thing and possibly even the baldness thing. Joel wasn’t sure about that; for starters, there was his certainty that the concept and design of these was definitely not, in the first instance, Boswell’s. Then, he also thought that maybe sometimes Etta tried to find the reasons she might have for doing a thing, rather than reasons someone else might have for doing a thing. All of her tattoos had an intense personal significance, certainly; but Joel had this inkling that maybe when Boswell said he found them funny, it was because he did, actually, find them funny.

Which, again, they were, but in a way that was not very compatible with The Moment. Even when you couldn’t see them, you were thinking about them, like for example now he was thinking about them, was thinking all this, when he should have been In The Moment and enjoying the simple delight of going down on Louis Laskin while Etta jerked him off in a way that was somehow endlessly surprising and unexpected and delightful, and it was just — he wished it was easier to switch himself off, sometimes.

He took a deep breath and didn’t switch himself off exactly, but turned the volume down as forcibly as he could. He eased his way back into The Moment, and his body did things without him thinking about them, and it was good.

Until there came a mew at the door. A long, vibrating mew. Lady Chatterley was as graceful as an opera singer, and had kind of an opera singer voice. She had a way of putting an extra sadness into it.

“Oh no,” said Etta, but didn’t, thankfully, stop. It was hardly the first time that they’d had to negotiate a cat situation, but most of the time they just left the doors open, since usually they were alone in the —

“You guys, this poor blind cat is sobbing her heart out,” said Harper, loudly, through the door. “She isn’t, like, capable of understanding why the door’s even been closed. She’s just weeping here, lonely, lost in her own darkness, no idea where you’ve all gone. I tried to comfort her but she didn’t want me, which is hardly a fuckin’ surprise, like who would, honestly? She doesn’t want to be stuck here with some shit-for-brains loser, she wants you; if she didn’t want you she’d have been off out an open window long ago. At least one of you. Probably Joel or Boswell, if I’m honest, no offense Etta but you don’t even live here.”

Lady Chatterley wailed, although whether in agreement or contradiction wasn’t entirely clear.

“And I’m just asking you to consider what’s more important here, your orgasm or this helpless animal whose heart is breaking. Plus, she’s driving me crazy here, I mean I don’t want to have to deal with her any more than you do.”

Lady Chatterley wailed again, long and tremulous. Wave Function Collapse, commonly known as Wavy, who had been sleeping on a large envelope in the corner, started to wake up, perhaps in response to the noise; he elongated his spine and stretched out his legs, splaying the toes. Unfortunately, in doing so he managed to hit Potato, loafing in the vicinity, in the eye; she gave an affronted yelp and stood up, arching her back as far as her rotund figure would allow.

Childe Harold, sensing an oncoming Commotion, dove from the wardrobe and bolted, tail brushy and furious, under the bed; this provoked a startled mew and a fart, and Lister darted out towards the closed door. A loud ‘Mow?’ and the sound of plastic rolling at speed over laminate flooring from beyond the door indicated that Wheels intended to join the party. Lister, thwarted by the closed door, leapt up on the bed and began rubbing himself against Boswell, who started to laugh.

“Well, fuck,” he said. “Guess this is over.”

They compromised and spent the next few hours watching _Stalker_ instead, Harper permitted to join them on the condition that he sat in a chair (Etta had drawn the line at letting him in the bed, yesterday’s bath notwithstanding) and stayed as quiet as he was able to. It was pretty cozy. Joel liked _Stalker_ because it was real interesting without being too stressful. He didn’t really understand the way so many movies seemed to put a lot of effort into making themselves unpleasantly tense, playing music that sped up your heart and ramping up the drama and peril, as if they were trying to make the experience less enjoyable. _Stalker_ was intense, but it never got fast and loud, never made Joel feel like his head was going to burst. He appreciated that.

Boswell fell asleep fairly early in the film; he must have been really tired. Joel kept letting his gaze slip away from the screen to look down at Boswell, looking so peaceful and calm, tucked between him and Etta, and over at Wavy and Wheels and Potato who were asleep too, in a basket of laundry, curled around each other in a pile of cat. Sleeping cats were good and sleeping Boswells were good. And he was so grateful for Etta being there. Harper, too; he wished he could get everyone he cared about all together in his flat and keep them all safe, always.

Boswell was so sleepy he didn’t even want to get up for dinner, even though Harper had ordered takeout pizza and beers to share, and Joel’s heart hurt at the thought of how uncomfortable and sleepless he must have been on the floor, in a sleeping bag. It was so difficult to protect people from everything. He felt kinda exhausted and underslept himself, so after eating he decided to make it an early night, showered, changed into pyjamas, took his temperature and logged it on the Excel spreadsheet he’d been keeping.

“Hey Boswell,” he said gently. “Can you wake up just for a second? I need to get your temp before I go to sleep too.”

Boswell blinked in a cute way and looked up at Joel. “Wha?” he asked blearily.

“Temperature,” said Joel.

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

Boswell hauled himself up in the bed and gave Joel a tired-looking smile as Joel placed the thermometer under his tongue. He could feel the same thin rope of anxiety that tightened around his heart and windpipe every time he did this, but it was tempered with an overwhelming fondness, and a gratitude that tonight they’d all three sleep beside each other again.

The thermometer beeped.

Joel held it up and saw the number, and the floor dropped out from beneath him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone WILL be fine by the end of this, we promise. Nobody's going to hospital, it's not that kind of story.


	9. 6. My (27M) boyfriend (25M) insists on wearing a copper arthritis-relief bracelet during sex. He doesn't have arthritis

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [bobcatmoran](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobcatmoran) for suggesting some Minnesota colour and to [yet_intrepid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yet_intrepid) for coming up with Boswell's names and associated backstory.

On the cusp of the 2010s, when Louis Laskin was still an impressionable teen with a full head of hair, living in Minnesota and not yet even Louis Laskin, he’d begun to be a little concerned by certain trends in global average temperatures. Which was how he’d ended up spending all of his free time hanging out with people who wore clothes made out of hemp and could bore you about a bike for hours.

They were good sorts, his ecofriends, who somehow sensed even before he did that the forename he went by back then wasn’t quite the ticket. That left a surname, which would have done nicely if he hadn’t, by some darkly humorous twist of fate, shared that name with a personal enemy: Minnesota Power’s Laskin Energy Center, which burned coal and belched CO2 and was no good at all. But it was call him by a name with evil connotations or draw direct attention to whatever was up with him genderwise, and being Minnesotans they naturally chose the former.

Of course, it caused all sorts of confusion.

“What we need to do,” someone’d be saying in a meeting “is change the public narrative around Laskin. Make people start to associate Laskin with destruction, disease and bad air quality. Uh, not you of course, Laskin.”

Laskin would laugh it off merrily. “That’s me!” he’d say. “Especially the bad air quality.”

However, the really seminal moment, the one that would have a truly disproportionate impact on his life and self-conception, came one day when a guy called Leaf — who had once spent a full hour telling Laskin about the importance of fat tires for year-round biking — was trying to get his attention across a crowded room.

“Hey, Boswell!” he said, and then “Ah, fuck.”

It was far too good not to become a running joke.

Minnesota Power’s three biggest coal-burning Energy Centers were Laskin, Boswell and Taconite Harbor, and perhaps if things had gone differently that day, Boswell would have been known for the rest of his life as Taconite Harbor. As it was, he had very little left from the Minnesota days but the nickname and his favorite jeans. 

It was something of an unexpected throwback to be staring down at what was unmistakably a bowl of Kissypoo Chocolate Raspberry Crapola.

“It’s your favorite flavour, right?” said Joel. “I definitely remembered you saying that.”

“Yeah, it’s my favourite of the Crapola flavours, absolutely — Joel, where did you even get this? Nowhere normal stocks this. And isn’t our grocery shopping still being done by a bunch of our neighbours?”

“Ordered it online. I was really impressed by the shipping, actually.”

“Because… you’re worried I’m not regular enough?”

“Etta said you told her you were sick of probiotic foods, and I felt really bad, so I wanted to get you something that was definitely for you.”

“So you got me Minnesota hippie cereal.”

“Oh god, do you not like it?”

“No, Joel, this is really, really sweet.”

“I think you’ll find that’s the agave nectar, actually!”

Joel was smiling at him, amused by his own joke. Boswell smiled back; they were almost okay there for a second, and then Boswell started coughing again.

The cough hadn’t been bad, not really, just annoying, especially when he wanted to sleep. The worst part, undoubtedly, was seeing what it did to Joel. He’d freeze in place, his eyes big and terrified, his eyebrows furrowed with concern, and he splayed his fingers and twisted his hands at the wrists. Boswell wanted to help Joel to calm down, but he knew the first step there was definitely to stop coughing, and his lungs were uncompliant. He buried his face in his sleeve, half to keep the coughs from getting directed at Joel and half so that he didn’t have to look at Joel’s scared face.

When he was done, Joel whisked the bowl of cereal away and said, “Anyway, you can eat this when I’m out of the room and you take your mask off, but first I want to listen to your chest again.”

“Aw,” said Boswell. “You don’t need to. I’m good.”

“You have a fever of a hundred and one! Actually, let’s check that again, and your O2 sat.”

And that was that; Joel was back into the same anxiously vibrating mode he’d been in for the last… five days? It was five days, right? Boswell was about the haziest he’d been about dates since beginning the whole global Unpleasantness (no, not that global Unpleasantness, or any of the other candidates for the title). Which was saying something.

“Honestly,” he said for maybe the millionth time, as Joel tucked the thermometer under his arm. “I don’t feel all that bad. I’ve had worse flus, you know?”

Joel gave him a Look that he didn’t know how to reason with, a sort of anguished pleading — for what exactly?

“Hey,” said Boswell, changing the subject, “How are Etta and Harper getting along?”

“Neither of them looks like they have symptoms, at least I don’t think so. Harper seems kinda off colour, but I think it’s just because he came to the end of the beer the night before last.”

“No, I meant, with each other? It kinda sucks I can’t be there to help them, you know, coexist peacefully.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, they’re getting along fine, I think.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Harper always sits with us when we watch documentaries and stuff in the evenings. It’s really nice, actually.”

Joel clipped the pulse oximeter onto Boswell’s finger and stared at it intensely until the number stabilised. Then drew in his breath sharply.

“Ninety-four?” asked Boswell. “Is that bad?”

Joel reached up his hand as if he were going to rub his nose, then thought better of it halfway. “So, the normal range is about ninety-five to ninety-nine percent. It’s only just below that, but it’s lower than yesterday, and I’m worried your lungs aren’t operating at full capacity, and —” he paused for a deep breath. “Anyway, let’s see, I guess.”

He looked really exhausted. The thermometer beeped.

“101.3,” he said. “It’s up since an hour ago.”

“But down since a couple days ago, right?”

Joel starfish-splayed his hands out again. “Yes, yes.”

Boswell tried another tack. “What have you and Etta been watching together?”

“Oh, mostly documentaries. Let me see, there was a pretty good one about otters, one about a guy with a 160 pound tumour — can you lift your shirt up? Thanks — and then one about this guy who said he was creating tracheas for transplantation with stem cells, but none of them worked and a lot of the patients died pretty horribly. And the Great British Baking Show. Can you breathe out for me?”

That suggested that Etta was letting Joel pick out the material; Boswell couldn’t tell if that was a good or a bad sign. The stethoscope’s cold touch moved across his chest; he wished Joel’s careful fingers would slip and brush against his skin.

“Okay, cough,” said Joel, and then, “Hm.”

“I love you,” said Boswell.

“Shh,” said Joel, “I’m trying to listen.” Then, “Love you too.”

_how’d you like the cereal?_ Etta texted him.

 _it was pretty good_ , he replied, _but you didn’t need to tell him about the probiotics and stuff_

_well, I figured you were never going to, and I didn’t want you to die without tasting normal food again._

He rolled his eyes a little, despite having no audience. _gotta say, it’s real cool how everyone’s decided I’m dying in here_

_that’s the impression I got from Joel, for sure_

_yeah,_ said Boswell, _he seems… stressed out_

_I think that’s fair to say._

_I keep trying to get him to understand that I’m gonna be fine, but it’s not working_

_it is not, no._

_any ideas about what I could do?_

_I think you need to start by acknowledging that you can’t tell him you’re gonna be fine, because you don’t know that! he needs you to validate him._

_what do you mean I don’t know that, I’m young and healthy and I —_ he hadn’t even finished composing his text before another of hers came through

_and don’t give me any crap about how you’re young and healthy, yadda yadda, we both know even when there’s a miniscule chance of something bad happening you’ll ride that miniscule chance into the yawning mouth of chaos. validate. his. anxiety._

_whatever._

_you know I’m fucking right, louis. also, honestly, I think you should let him take care of you. put on some pleading eyes and let him plump your pillows and bathe your fevered brow. he needs to feel like he’s doing something._

_that’s why you told him about the food thing, isn’t it_

_he was calm for like fifteen whole minutes while he ordered that ridiculous cereal for you._

_anyway, in other business, how are you and Harper getting on?_

_fine._

_you gonna tell me any more than that?_

_no. we’re fine. concentrate on your own shit, you’ve got enough to deal with._

But that was the thing; he kinda didn’t. Being sick was pretty boring, especially since he’d shifted from “sleeping all the time” to “hardly ever sleeping because whenever he tried he started to cough”. He’d tried watching stupid TV on his laptop, but he was tired and it was hard to concentrate, and he always had to spend ages syncing up the sound and the picture because of a weirdly persistent issue his laptop had with playing video; by the time he’d got things to work he’d be annoyed and headachey. He didn’t really feel like reading anything. He’d stopped attending group Zoom meetings because he couldn’t really contribute anything and kept coughing; even when he muted he could tell it was distracting people. People checked in on him, but he had started to feel somewhat isolated. Which, in fact, he literally was. He didn’t like being stuck alone in a room, and his dislike of it was only intensified by the fact that there now appeared to be an information firewall installed on the bedroom door.

In short, he was feeling mildly sorry for himself.

Lister, who was sleeping on what was usually Joel’s pillow, got up, gave a huge stretch, and lay down again closer to Boswell. Boswell scratched Lister’s ribs, and Lister farted and gave a couple of grunts that could have been purrs or might have indicated sexual pleasure. In confinement, Boswell had really started to appreciate Lister. His straightforward communication, chilled-out lifestyle and simple needs had a lot going for them. He might have been a semi-incontinent sex pest, but having seen what Lady Chatterley could do with a mouse, Boswell was loath to apply human standards of behaviour to any feline. At least this way he got affection from a fellow mammal, rather than having to explain to his employer why his uniform had been permanently stained by a pile of leftover entrails.

He decided to FaceTime Courfeyrac.

“Hey buddy,” said Courfeyrac, who’d picked up after, like, half a ring. “What’s up? You look like absolute shit, I gotta say.”

Boswell waggled his eyebrows. “That’s not what your Mama said last night.”

“Christ, you really are ill, that’s not your usual standard of material. Besides, my Mama’s Masque-of-the-Red-Deathing it with my Papa in their summer home on the Chesapeake Bay, they haven’t had any contact with the outside world for over a month. I think they may have paid one of the maids to come with them and live with her boyfriend and toddler in the side wing. How’s the invalid life suiting you? You breathing okay?”

“God, everyone keeps asking me that. You’ll have to ask Joel, to be honest; he’s more familiar with my lungs than I am at this point. But you know, I’m basically fine, it’s like a cold with less snot. I’m losing my mind with boredom, though.”

“Sure do feel you there. I’m banging around this place on my own. The other day I tried to make banana bread just to feel something.”

“Wait, wasn’t Marcus living with you? Did he leave or something?”

“Marcus is like the hamster I got when I was ten. Turned out to be entirely nocturnal. Whenever I see him he’s unconscious on the futon. I can tell he gets up because things get moved around overnight and he eats the banana bread I leave out for him. I dunno what he’s doing while I’m asleep, but I’m starting to think he goes out for walks in between reading the same stack of books about Obama over and over again. I’m not completely sure he even knows we’re in lockdown.”

“Lucky him. Listen, I do have a favour to ask, if I’m honest.”

“Anything for my poor sick friend.”

“Barely. _Technically_ sick, at most.”

“Your mouth says one thing, your wan face says another. Anyway, fire away.”

Boswell outlined the Situation between Etta and Harper; or, at least, as much as he knew of it, and as much of that as he could manage before he got cut off by a coughing fit.

“Right,” said Courfeyrac, when he’d finished. “Awkward. So, what were you wanting me to do exactly?”

“Could you… like… Find out if World War Three is happening in the flat and if it is, make peace between them?”

Courfeyrac sighed. “Oh, jeez.”

“I could manage this if I weren’t” Boswell waved his hands around to indicate his current situation.

“Listen, buddy. I know you don’t want to hear this, but sometimes you gotta let people do their thing and not interfere. Let them sort it out themselves. It’s like, take Marcus. Dude needs therapy, and probably antidepressants, and definitely also to stop going outside during a pandemic. I’ll probably have a word with him about that last one, to be honest, but just in general I’ve found it a lot more productive to step back and give him space to figure stuff out on his own, rather than smothering him, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Boswell, “But Marcus is… different.”

“Marcus is a little weird, but let’s be honest here, so is Harper, in his own sweet way. And I don’t know Etta very well but I bet she’s got baggage just like the rest of us. I think they might be best off sorting this out between them.”

Boswell tried to make noises in objection to this, but then he was coughing again and Courfeyrac was looking concerned.

“Dude,” he said. “You should try to rest up. Stop worrying about this stuff.”

Boswell, grudgingly, half obeyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reason Joel has switched to taking armpit temperatures is that it means Boswell doesn't have to take the mask off while Joel's in the room. His infection control procedures here are appropriate; if you're caring for someone with Covid and you have to be in the same room as them, both you and the patient should be wearing surgical masks. 
> 
> Since a couple of cats have tested positive, it's no longer recommended that cats be allowed to sleep in the same bed as Covid sufferers, but this wasn't really known back in April, and the risks are very low. In any case, Lister and all the other cats will be fine.


	10. WIBTA for using the kitchen sink as a toilet?

Boswell half-napped for a while after that, drifting in and out. After a while, he started to become aware that Harper was outside the door, talking.

“…so I feel honor-bound to tell you,” he was saying, “how wretchedly miserable I am behind this door without you, flimsy thing that it is, as though germs can’t get through a piece of wood. We’re probably all sick by now; God knows I feel ill. It’s like a man died inside my mouth, Boswell. Not in a French way. Nothing good. The booze ran out the day before yesterday; did you know? Or yesterday, if you count the time it left my body. There’s nothing left! I had a moment of hope looking through your medicine cabinet, but Joel only uses non-alcoholic mouthwash, were you aware of that? Of course you were. Your boyfriend is deranged, this is why he’s always walking around with his eyes wet as a puppy’s and his hands twitching like dying spiders, he’s trying to get through our present reality way, way too sober, it’s no way for a man to live, and now because of the surrender of the American people to unfreedom and the overwhelming moralism of a so-called mutual aid society that has taken it upon itself to legislate which needs are sufficiently virtuous to ministrate to, which is to say they will provide food because the needs of the stomach are worthy but they will not provide anodynes because the needs of the mind are unworthy, because of this moral stance I have no choice but to raw-dog it, and I can’t do it, Boswell. I can’t take this horseshit without some kind of, like, kindly warping piece of plastic wrap smeared over the functional parts of my brain to keep full awareness from falling in on me. I keep telling Joel, I tell him: ‘Joel, just open the door. Let’s all pile in around poor old Boswell and catch his luck. Come what may. It’ll happen all the same. We might as well enjoy it.’ You know, at least if I were delirious with fever that might make things tolerable. Instead, I just feel like shit.”

“Wait, where’s Joel?” asked Boswell, weakly.

“I told you, man, he’s losing his shit, Etta’s with him now, they’re both in the bathroom. Like, neither of them even asked if I needed to pee before they monopolized the facilities for god knows how long, I’ll probably have to end up pissing into a bunch of empty bottles, maybe the sink, who knows how the fancy takes me. Did you know your boyfriend is deranged, Boswell? Wait, fuck, I said that part already. But, like, you should see the stuff he keeps watching, Laskin! He’s crazy with fear because he hasn’t accepted the inevitable decay of the human body, hasn’t accepted that sooner or later everything we love sickens and dies, that to love is to accept the worm of grief into your heart, and somehow he thinks it’ll help his state of mind to watch every two hour chronicle of human disease and debility he can get his shaky little paws on! Madman! Yesterday, I found myself learning the life history of some poor motherfucker with a 160 pound tumor. Boswell, that tumor weighed like ten pounds more than I do! That is a tumor the size of a man! I’m surprised the doctors could tell which was which: to be honest I’m not entirely convinced they got it right; maybe they cut the man away to wither up on the operating floor. Maybe the tumor walked out of there to go on living its life. It was pretty ugly, true, but have you ever sat around a Greyhound bus depot at 3 o’clock in the morning? I know you have. This tumor would’ve fit right in. I think it could make its way in the world. It would absolutely figure, for the disease to grow and thrive and the sufferer to fall to pieces; after all, that’s the way most things happen, and good for them, right, like at the end of the day it’s better to die when more and more human-shaped corruption stalks this wretched earth each day. You’d be lucky if this thing killed you, Boswell, and that’s exactly why I’m sure it won’t, no offense. We all know about your jinx, dude. You’re in no danger here; I’m unconcerned.”

“That’s good.”

“What I am is annoyed. You do realize Joel’s a fucking basket case? He’s far too close right now to the reality of human existence, to the truth which is that all human connections are merely the breeding ground for fear and pain and contagion, and I keep trying to get him to take a Valium or whatever, but he won’t hear of it, claims he doesn’t wanna ‘foster a dependency’, as if that would be the worst thing in the world. Won’t give me any either. He’s gonna die of too much unfiltered plague time reality, Boswell, and then I’ll die of boredom with only Etta for company— she won’t even talk to me, she just puts her earbuds in when I try to start conversations with her, real ostentatious about it, too, like she’s sure showing me by listening to the fucking Cure so loud I can hear it across the table, and it’s not even one of their really good albums, yeah, Etta Musich is really showing me for having opinions and daring to voice them out loud in her presence— and once I’m dead, then Etta’s gonna die because she’ll have nobody to ignore and feel superior to. And then the cats are all gonna die or run off because you’re not feeding them. And then you’ll be all alone behind your door, with your coronavirus and your luck, and you’ll wish you’d let me in here while you still had the chance. What are the chances I gave it to you in the first place, huh? I’m always a sick fuck, my insides are pickled, I bet I’m carrying all kinds of diseases, so I bet I can’t even get sick from you, or I can but it doesn’t matter, and in either case I bet you want to chew me out big time for darkening your lovely apartment with my stink and the specter of death, huh? So open the damn door and let me have it! I deserve it! Oh, hello, Potato. Yeah, I’m talking to your bald dad! Yeah, I know. I want in, too. Everything’s so boring without him. I’m so bored I could do myself in. Oh, big stretch! You’re real limber for such a fat little fuck. C’mere.”

Boswell drifted back again into something that wasn’t quite sleep, but more or less resembled it.


	11. Wheels

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Wheels:** tortoiseshell cat with cat wheelchair, f


	12. UPDATE] My (27M) boyfriend (25M) insists on wearing a copper arthritis-relief bracelet during sex. He doesn't have arthritis

There was a knock on the door. Boswell grunted and blinked his eyes open. Another knock.

“I brought your lunch,” said Joel, through the door. “Is it okay if I come in?”

Boswell sat himself up, pulled a mask on again. He had to admit, there were times in his life when he’d felt better than this. He was mildly woozy, not in a bigtime way, just in a “guess the café manager didn’t check the OSHA regs before buying these cleaning products but we still gotta use them anyway” kind of a way. Breathing felt less comfortable than it seemed like it should, which: same, honestly. He had the kind of headache that you’d usually only get from spending three hours filling out forms on a government website only to run into a 403 Forbidden error on the final page.

“Sure,” he said. “Come on in.”

Joel came in, flanked by Wavy, weaving inexpertly around his ankles, and Wheels, trundling alongside him. He was carrying a tray, which he set down on top of the chest of drawers. It had an empty plate set next to a round oven dish. It contained what looked like some sort of vegetable casserole, topped with orange tater tots arranged in neat concentric rings.

“Joel,” asked Boswell, “is that a tater tot hotdish?”

Joel smiled. “I looked up a recipe online.”

Boswell leaned back on the pillows, feeling dizzy again. “Thanks,” he said.

“You can eat it when I’ve left, it’s pretty hot anyway. I — I wanted to make you something you’d actually like.”

“Oh, Joel. That’s kind. I really appreciate it.” Boswell closed his eyes.

“Are you okay? You don’t seem okay.”

“I’m fine,” he lied. Then he thought better of it. “Actually,” he admitted, “I feel kinda crappy.”

Joel sat down on the edge of the bed. “I brought you some more Tylenol,” he said. “It’s been four hours since you last took it. But can I check your fever first?”

“Sure.”

He sandwiched the thermometer under Boswell’s arm.

“So, apparently you and Etta locked yourselves in the bathroom,” said Boswell.

“Oh god yeah, we kinda left Harper unsupervised. Sorry about that. Did he bug you?”

“Not too badly. I guess he felt a bit neglected, though. Are you guys okay?”

Joel fiddled with the bridge of his glasses. “She said she really needed some uh, quality time. We kinda made out a bit.”

“Sexy.”

“Yeah, it was for a while, actually. Whole place was full of that bath bomb smell, you know from that stuff she buys. The soap that comes in the black containers.”

“Lush? Yeah, she loves that place.”

“I think she might be a little bit fed up with having to share space with Harper all the time,” said Joel, as he clipped the oximeter to Boswell’s finger.

“Mmm-hmm?”

“I guess she’s used to having her own room.”

“Yeah,” said Boswell, who was feeling tired the way he did that time the twenty four hour warehouse’s software malfunctioned and scheduled him for three shifts in a row, and his boss told him he had to do the shifts or get fired.

“She gets a lot more privacy in her own place,” he explained. “It’s been a bit rough on her not having that.”

The thermometer was ready. “101.9,” said Joel. “Damn, it did go up.”

He was twisting his hands again. Boswell said, “Seems like you’re worried about that.”

“Well, I am a bit…” Joel took a couple of deep breaths. “God, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t be freaking you out as well, that’s the last thing you need.”

“Hey,” said Boswell. “Don’t you keep telling me about how important honest communication is in medicine? Also, I’m not freaking out. Just let me know what you’re thinking, and we can talk this through, okay?”

Joel’s shoulders dropped a little. “Okay,” he said. “So, I keep reading about how — I mean, this thing comes on slowly, and a lot of people only start getting really sick after about the fifth day, and you’ve been sick for five days, and it seems like you’re getting worse all of a sudden, and I don’t know what to do if — okay, you’re still satting at 94, at least it hasn’t dropped I guess — I mean, listen, I’ve been talking to Cam, you really don’t want to end up in the hospital.”

“Does it seem like I need the hospital now?”

“No. Not at all, really. Just, if your fever keeps going higher —”

“Yeah,” said Boswell patiently. “That’s pretty scary.”

“I’ve been trying to plan out, like, what I’d do. You know they aren’t even letting people in to visit? I just like… I’d hand you over and not see you after that, so I guess I’d have to keep calling the ward to find out what was happening, maybe I could try to get Cam to check up on you, I don’t know, and then I worry about Etta getting sick too, or Harper, maybe the tests were wrong and I gave it to you in the first place —”

“So,” said Boswell. “Let’s try to stick to the things that are happening right now, okay?” A wave of dizziness hit him.

“You really don’t feel great, do you?” said Joel.

“I feel like shit, to be perfectly honest.” Boswell laughed a little.

“Okay, well, like I said, I brought Tylenol, and some zinc lozenges, there’s a good evidence base for those in colds so I don’t see why that wouldn’t hold for other coronaviruses, and some lemon balm cough sweets. And a bunch of electrolytes; I bet you’re not drinking enough.”

“Thanks. It’s really good having you here to look after me.”

Joel nodded, earnestly.

“You wanna step out while I drink this and take some pills?”

“Yeah.”

“Can you come back in afterwards, though? I — I don’t wanna get you sick, but I’d like to have you around for a bit, if that’s okay.”

“Of course. Honestly, I’m probably gonna get sick already.”

“Hope not. This thing kinda sucks. Also, Joel, can I ask you another favour?”

“Sure, anything?”

Boswell steeled himself. The temptation to turn away was overwhelming, but he knew that he owed Joel honesty, however hard that might be for both of them.

“Can we stick the hotdish in the freezer?” he asked. “It looks real good, and I love that you made it for me, but my appetite’s gone to hell, and I’d rather have it when I’m able to enjoy it.”

“Oh, yeah of course, no problem. I’m sorry. Gosh, I didn’t mean to —”

“You don’t need to be sorry. It means a lot to me. But I’d rather just have you here with me for a bit. And hotdish freezes really well.”

Joel nodded vigorously. “Good to know!”

He washed down a couple Tylenol with the electrolyte drink; it was this DIY Gatorade stuff Joel made himself, some kind of herbal tea in it, nettle? It tasted of grass clippings and honey. He debated the cough drops and the zinc lozenges and decided the ‘blackcurrant flavour’ promised by the latter was more immediately appealing. He pushed it around in his mouth; it wasn’t bad.

A knock. “Hey, can I come back in?” asked Joel.

“Yeah,” he said, replacing the mask. “Please.”

Joel was carrying some kind of sausage wrapped in a gingham dishrag.

“I brought gel packs from the freezer,” said Joel. “For your head. I’ve wrapped them in a dish towel.”

“Cool.”

“Cold, actually. Freezing.”

Boswell snorted, took the bundle, then said. “Wait. I didn’t tell you my head hurt.”

“I guessed. You seemed headachey. You kept closing your eyes.”

“Well, thanks, anyway.”

He held the sausage up to his forehead. It felt good.

“Why don’t you lie down?” said Joel. “Do you need the pillows rearranged? I’ve been thinking, what if we used the other pillows and some cushions and sort of propped you up at an angle, maybe that might make it easier to sleep.”

“Look, at this point I’ll try anything.”

“Oh! Cool! Well, in _that_ case…”

As Joel fussed around with the pillows, he outlined various schemes for getting Boswell a good night’s sleep, starting with lavender and ending with binaural beats played through earbuds.

“…and the frequency difference generates delta brainwaves, which should put you into a state of deep sleep,” he finished. “There. Try lying back now, it might be more comfortable.”  
Boswell lay back. It felt strange; definitely easier to breathe than when he was lying flat, though. He lifted the gel pack bundle back up again, but Joel tutted.

“Give me that,” he said. “I’ll hold it in place. You try to rest.”

Boswell closed his eyes. God, he felt tired. It was comforting, anyway, having Joel there, and having his head feel a bit cooler, and knowing he wasn’t alone. Lister hopped up onto the bed and snuggled into Boswell’s side.

“Oh no,” said Joel. “Give me a sec, I’ll get rid of him.”

“Nah,” said Boswell. “Let him be. He’s a sweetheart, really.”

“He is, isn’t he?” said Joel, warmly.

Boswell took some deep breaths. He could feel sleep creeping up around the edges of his mind.

“Tell me how everyone’s getting on,” he said. “I miss all the Zoom calls.”

“Oh, well, hm. Barry and Jean still haven’t been evicted, so there’s that. Courfeyrac thinks that Marcus has been going out for walks in the dead of night — goodness only knows where to, Courfeyrac thought it might be to see a girl…”

And just like that, without so much as a single binaural beat, Boswell fell asleep.


	13. My (24F) boyfriends (25M, 27M) have unionized

Etta was starting to feel a deep, bone-grinding resentment towards people who were experiencing a burst of creativity during lockdown. She’d tried to write, had sat in front of a blank page, music pounding in her ears, chat window and web browser minimized, trying to put words to what was happening. Nothing. A huge silence in her head. The world was ending and she was fucking _blocked_. Harper sat opposite her, head visible above the parapet of her laptop screen, mouth moving constantly but nothing actually audible above her earbuds’ soundtrack, and it was like he’d been possessed by the spirit of her own creative vision because that was it, that was what it felt like: somewhere, outside her, words were definitely being formed, articulated, and they were her words but she couldn’t make any of them out, not above everything else. Maybe, as with Harper, she didn’t want to.

So she was just filling up her day: reading, watching things on her laptop with Joel, watching things on her laptop without Joel. She made up her face in more and more elaborate ways. She got really into following these YouTube tutorials by some homeschooled baby goth called Euphrasie, and one time totally freaked Joel out because it looked like she had spiders hatching out of her cheek. Anything to fill up the time and keep her from being over-conscious of reality, of the whole trapped-in-the-space-station-with-the-Alien Mood of the thing. There were three of them in two rooms, plus of course the bedroom, now off bounds, which Joel disappeared into periodically and emerged looking more upset than before. So they cycled between the kitchen/living room/now a fucking bedroom, and the bathroom. Sometimes she locked herself and Joel in the bathroom and kissed him desperately, hungrily, trying to sublimate all of her feelings about the world falling apart into sex, which only ever half worked. Sometimes Harper locked himself in the bathroom and chucked up so noisily that it cut through The Cure.

She hadn’t physically seen Louis in over a week; he’d shrunk to the size of a video call window like everyone else on the fucking planet. She wasn’t losing her shit about him the way Joel was, but the quarantining and Joel’s careful, professional donning of PPE to even enter the room and his evident tension when leaving it added up to a theatrics of fear that Louis’ flattened, rectangular, definitely sick appearance hardly helped to quell. He didn’t seem to be terribly ill, but there was that hint of the unknown, stalking them; the best monster flicks, after all, kept their creatures mostly hidden.

She was more concretely worried about Joel. He was okay, in the uniquely Joelish sense of okay, when he was intently focused on pampering Louis back to wellness. Sometimes she could distract him with other shit. But too often he seemed to be visibly unspooling.

She was also, right at the moment, worried that he was going to freeze them all to fucking death.

“The evidence is there,” he was explaining, eyes big and dark like one of the cats prowling after a bread tie, “that in a wide range of viruses the dose can be extremely critical in determining the severity of disease. Which means that it’s really important that we keep the air circulating, so that we don’t allow the expired air to build up inside this enclosed space, which creates a large initial viral dose, which constitutes an overwhelming response —”

And then, in counterpoint, Harper: “What you medical guys fail repeatedly to understand — and I get it, this is one of the failings of the education system in this fucking country, the division between humanities and sciences, like I get it I really do, but the thing is, ‘disease’ as a category is extremely socially constructed. We label one thing as a disease, because it’s a virus or a fungus or a grotesque parasite that causes it or we can pin it down to an organ in the body, but most importantly because of where we locate the blame, which is to say, we displace the blame _onto_ a virus or a fungus or a grotesque parasite and _away from_ the patient, whereas in cases where the blame is attributed to a patient’s own morally failing actions, even if it’s distantly, even if it’s just that a person tried to escape reality in a way that’s deemed to be socially unacceptable and now he’s not even able to access that avenue of escape and as a result he’s shaking in his boots, his body is collapsing in on itself, but you see because society deems that the urge to escape reality is unacceptable, un fuckin thinkable, that’s not a disease. That’s just the consequence of his actions. No sympathy. So I tell you, I’m shaking with cold and it’s fifty degrees outside and I need the warmth of a human dwelling to give me some semblance of wellness, which is to say, Joel I need you to close the windows already, and you’re like, no. No, Harper, you’re not sick, or rather, your sickness is not a disease, which means your request is trumped by the eternal demands of the goddess Hygeia. You cannot be warm. You cannot close a window.”

What she hated most of all was that, when it came to practicalities, she was on Harper’s side.

“Here’s the thing, Joel,” she said. “I have a need right now for comfort and warmth which is not met while all the windows in the flat are wide open. Harper’s right that since the temperature dropped this is not an acceptable situation. When it gets warmer, we can open the windows back up again, although maybe not all the way, because the draft is really uncomfortable.”

“I don’t think you understand,” said Joel. He looked distraught. “Any of us could be incubating this right now. I’m just trying to make sure that if we do end up passing this thing to each other, it’s relatively mild, and I’m concerned that because of the aerosol buildup inside any space that doesn’t have air that’s constantly circulating we are more likely to end up with severe disease, and I don’t want anyone to get sicker than they need to be. It’s bad enough that Boswell —”

“This is what I mean,” said Harper. “Right now Boswell is, for once, luckier than all of us; he has a disease which society smiles upon, he’s worthy of pity. Let’s think about framing this in terms you social justice warriors are familiar with; isn’t it a kind of privilege, to be sick in a way that is so clearly sympathetic? Shouldn’t we be questioning the social capital that comes along with that, the way in which his socially recognized illness gives him access to a whole raft of advantages: a comfortable bed, when some of us are sleeping on couches. His own space, when others are crowded and have no privacy. Such privileges —”

“Harper, for _fuck’s sake_ ,” said Etta, feeling a burst of recognition that was like: oh, huh, the end of my tether, so that’s where it is. “You have your own _fucking apartment_ and if you feel so uncomfortable I don’t know why you can’t just fucking leave. Just get the fuck out! Things are bad enough without you making them worse! Nobody asked you to come here in the first place!”

Several things happened at once. The room, which was already chilly because all of the windows were wide open, dropped a couple more degrees. Harper Kaysar sank like a ripped inflatable; his deflated face flapped like the sagging features of a blobfish. Joel went pale and he ran to the bathroom, closing the door behind him; she heard the squeak of its ill-fitting lock sliding shut. Etta felt an acrid wave of regret rise up from her stomach. Her throat stung with the bitter, chemical burn of it.

Childe Harold, from the windowsill, gave a howl of sympathetic misery.

She’d fucked up. She’d fucked up, she’d fucked up. But she was still angry, so she went over to the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water. Harper trailed limply behind her. She drank the water and closed her eyes.

“Real fuckin’ sorry you have to deal with me right now, dude,” Harper was mumbling. He sounded, like, 90% sarcastic. She wanted him to go away.

“Look,” she said, not looking at him. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. It was mean.”

“Nah, man, I get it, nobody really wants me here. I’m just hanging around, stinking the place up, fucking things up for everybody. Probably all just wish I’d fuck off and die, right?”

Still with the sarcasm.

“We can talk about this in a bit, okay?” she said. “I’m going to try to make sure Joel’s okay first.”

“Sure,” he muttered, and skulked off to lie on the sofa. She went to the bathroom door and knocked as softly as she could.

“Hey, Joel,” she said. “I’m really sorry. I apologized to Harper, and now I’m apologizing to you.”

Joel just made distressed noises; maybe there were words somewhere in there, but she couldn’t tell through the bathroom door.

God, she wished so badly that Boswell were there, and were well, and could handle this. She tried to think about what he’d say, if he were there, if he weren’t sick. If none of this were happening.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what you’re going to do. I’m going to get you a Valium and a glass of cold water, and you’re going to unlock the door so that I can give them to you, and we’ll take it from there. That good with you?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah, I guess,” said Joel, hiccupping. “I mean, okay, sure.”  


  
His face was blotchy, his eyes swollen and red. He was breathing too much. His hair was mussed in a way that was weirdly reminiscent of the way early modern heroines’ and three-camera sitcom female characters’ hair would be styled to indicate that they’d discovered sex. In this instance, it presumably pointed instead to Joel’s having discovered the dark, rotten heart of humanity.

“I was out of line,” she said, as he swallowed the pill and the water. He was perched on the side of the bath, all his limbs tense, and his hands, and his neck. Everything contracted.

Thing was, she was bad at this. She’d never been the shoulder-to-cry-on kind of a person, and Joel might not be actively crying as they spoke but he seemed like he was only recently emerging from it and might be on the verge of doing so again. It made her fidgety. There was this clawing, pushpull tussle in her heart, between tenderness and the urgent need to be somewhere else. It was the feeling you got of not wanting to touch something precious and breakable.

“What can I do to help?” she asked.

He drew a couple of breaths. “Don’t need to apologize,” he said. “‘Just, I — I don’t know how to fix this.”

She tried to think of ways to fix being locked in a small apartment with a deadly pandemic virus and Harper Kaysar. Nothing really occurred to her, so she kicked off her shoes and climbed into the bathtub.

“What are you doing?” asked Joel, startled into some kind of coherence.

“Come on,” she said. “Get in here on top of me, and I’ll hug you.”

She’d never done this sober, but it had calmed Irma one time when she accidentally got weepy-drunk on tequila. It was… different, doing it with a clear head. Definitely helped that neither she nor Joel were liable to make the basketball team. The pressure of him on her, the heat that came off his body, was good, even if she could tell that the sharp jut of his hip into her stomach would eventually become painful. He seemed to be slowing down. She held onto him; closed her eyes and imagined a tiny boat out in a huge sea.

They lay there in a weird sort of pietà, until Wavy the cat gave a little mew from on top of the toilet seat and flung himself inelegantly onto them. Joel laughed.

“Hey buddy,” he said, chucking Wavy under the chin, then, with a choking breath, “Dunno why I’m so wound up today.”

“I guess we’re all a bit on edge,” she said.

Joel sighed. “Do you think we could fit an air mattress into the living room, somehow? All my joints ache.”

“It’d have to be a narrow one. Why doesn’t Harper let you go on the sofa?”

He tensed up again, and she cursed inwardly.

“I think we could maybe make it work, though, maybe,” she suggested, trying to move things on. “You’d have to move the armchair into the bedroom, I think.”

“Perhaps we should do that.” He gave a little shiver. “Okay, I need tea, I think.”

They extracted themselves carefully, along with the cat. Joel still looked a mess, his face flushed and tired. She kissed him gently on the forehead. That made her pause. She reached up a hand to feel it.

“What’s wrong?” asked Joel, his eyes bright with alarm.

“Look, don’t panic,” she said, with considerable futility, “but when was the last time you checked your temperature?”

Harper was lying on the sofa with a cushion over his head. He looked like a three-year-old playing hide and seek. He kept fidgeting, as if even lying still and pretending to be unconscious was beyond him.

“So, looks like Joel has the Covid,” she said, curling up into the armchair with her book. “Thought you should know.”

Harper grunted.

“One down, two to go I guess,” she said. “Woo fucking woo.”

Harper had his left arm flopping over the sofa in what was, she realised with some dismay, undoubtedly an attempt to recreate the death of Chatterton, except with more throw pillows. The palm of his hand had a dark smear on it, riven by flesh-toned creases. A tattoo, done by someone who had neither the skill to tattoo a palm well nor the judgement to avoid it altogether. She let her eyes rest on the patchy blot for a bit, and suddenly something jumped out at her; within the darkness was a screaming mouth, almost indiscernible between the cracks where the palm’s folds had worn the ink away, teeth bared. Something about it reminded her of something. She tried to keep reading, but it nagged.

She was wading through an early Poppy Z. Brite anthology but it really wasn’t enjoying it, although it was unclear whether that was because she was tired of this particular brand of horror or because the Situation had busted her concentration. She reached over to the stack of books she’d brought along with her, and that was when she saw the spine of _The Cipher_ , and it hit her. She pulled the paperback out of the stack. There it was, on the cover: a hand with a screaming mouth at its centre.

“Fuck,” she said, looking at Harper’s palm. “is that the Funhole?”

“I’m guessing,” he said, without removing the cushion, “that right now a portal to the dark and unspeakable horrors of the human id has opened on Joel’s living room floor. Figures.”

“Actually, I meant the tattoo, not the metaphor central to the novel” said Etta, “but yeah, this would be about the time, wouldn’t it.”

“Oh yeah, that,” said Harper. “Sometimes I forget it’s there, man, like I see it but I forget that it’s not just a projection of my inner self. I fucked it up, anyway. Could probably do it better if I tried it again, make it last a couple more years anyway. Actually,” he sat upright, forgetting the cushion, which rolled off onto the floor, “I should totally do you one! You want one? What if I like, swathed myself in plastic and walked over to my flat… Joel wouldn’t like it but Joel’s sick so he wouldn’t even need to know. Or what if I gave you a stick and poke?”

“Eh, I’m good,” said Etta, although she did wonder whether maybe a Funhole somewhere less un-tattooable would be good, just above the navel maybe. She was kinda craving the sting of one, a bite of pain to take her out of herself.

“How’s old Poppy, eh?” said Harper, eyeing the discarded book. “Man, it’s been a while since I gave him a readthrough.”

“Borrow it, if you like,” said Etta. “I gave up. I’m guessing all the stuff about the vagina being a gaping maw of terror is like, working through some of the trans dude shit, but it’s kinda exhausting.”

“Oh man,” said Harper. “I wouldn’t know about that sorta thing, you’d need to ask my main man Boswell about that shit, I got no clue. From my point of view, all I can point out is there’s few things uglier than a dick and balls, like no offence but I have no idea how gay dudes handle that shit, like it’s one thing if you’re just like, you know you’re two dudes helping each other out, having a little fun after a party, but making your whole life revolve around _that_ , I mean fuck. Thank god I’m not gay, huh? Still gotta deal with having a full set on me but you get used to it. Like, let’s be real, nobody would really want a quote unquote manly form, or maybe I guess some weirdos would, look at Boswell for example. He’s exceptional though. In a lot of ways. Most dudes, you ask them would you rather look like a sweet coed with tits to die for they’d jump at it, but you gotta cope with the lot you’re given, such is the lot of man, Boswell excepted. I keep saying to him, man why’d you want this, who the fuck wants hairs poking out of their face, who wants it enough to deal with a shit ton of societal flak and stress and needles, just to look like a dude of all things, but he wants what he wants, my sweet crazy buddy. Like, not clinically crazy to be clear, no offence to Joel.

“I guess there’s some dudes who carry it well. Like Mike — you know Mike diAngelo, right? of course you do. Everyone does. Mike carries it well but he looks like a girl anyway half the time, that’s the sweet spot I guess, looking like a girl but none of the shit you’d get for being one, not something that’s possible with this dumb body right here, I mean have you looked at it? Anyway yeah I guess grudgingly I gotta concede that Mike is pretty much the best you can get within the confines of the masculine form, not in a gay way, you understand. Presumably he has a dick and balls too somewhere in there but it’s not like they get any use. Maybe not, maybe he’s as dickless as an actual angel, or one of those dudes, what’s the name of them, the sex clones they make for sweet li’l Barbie. Ken! What a name. Hardly a sexy name even for a eunuch whose main purpose is the sexual satisfaction of a cultural icon, even if he does it all sans dick or balls, guess it’s a hands and tongues situation. So, to return to my point, you look at these two exemplars, these images of what culturally we desire a body to be, and you asked anyone, who do you wanna be, Barbie or Ken, it’s no competition, right? And like, you see that evidenced in, which one is a cultural fuckin icon and which one is a concubine. Which one is a plastic capitalist expression of human perfection and which one drives a car.

“This is why it’s dangerous to get rid of the patriarchy, like sure it’s not like I begrudge the right to vote and all that but maybe we gotta have a little bit of a cultural pretence that there’s something good about being a guy because some of us are stuck that way and it’s important we don’t all throw ourselves over cliffs like lemmings because we gotta reproduce, we gotta perpetuate the species. You need us for the gene pool and we can’t all be Mike diAngelo, not that he’s doing much to father offspring, someone should send him all those Shakespeare poems about how fair youths gotta make babies, seeds spring from seeds and beauty breedeth beauty you know? I bet there’s loads of girls who’d love to carry his offspring. Hordes of them. Also, I know lemmings don’t biologically do the thing, I was referring to the iconic video game from the late nineties, probably you’re too young to know about it. Anyway, maybe I’ll borrow the book from you, yeah. Not like there’s much to do around here, anyway. What’re you watching this evening?”

“I, uh, haven’t decided,” said Etta, who was trying to process the full gallon canister of worms she’d unwittingly opened. 

Joel, over Zoom, looked astonishingly happy. Way happier than before he got the virus.

“I’ve been using this enzyme spray I ordered from Britain,” he said. “It arrived too late to be useful to Boswell —”

“Just my luck!” interjected Boswell, with a laugh.

“— but in time for me, I guess. See, they’ve been shown to shorten the duration of the common cold, and I’m still working on the hypothesis that this is a coronavirus so we should start out by exploring things that have been shown to work with other coronaviruses. I’ve been keeping a symptom diary. Also we’re rewatching Cowboy Bebop. Kinda out of order.”

“We skipped ahead to the one with the slime monster,” said Boswell.

“Yeah! It just seemed appropriate, right? Stalking around the ship trying to find the Creature that’s incapacitated your friends one by one while trying not to let it catch you unawares. Also reminds me, we should clear the fridge out… that can wait, though, I guess.”

“So, you’re feeling okay?”

“Oh yeah, I mean, this thing comes on slowly, I don’t expect myself to really start to desaturate for at least a week, maybe more. If I’m going to, that is. I’m really interested to see how badly I end up having this. There’s been a lot of conflicting evidence about whether mild asthma is an exacerbating factor or not, so we’ll have to see, I guess.” He looked way more excited about this than anyone should be.

“You’re running pretty hot, though,” pointed out Boswell.

“Sure am. Oh! Boswell’s temperature went down, though, that’s good news.”

“Still got one,” said Boswell. “But it’s lower and I feel a bit less crappy.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Etta.

They looked really cozy, leaning against one another. 

  
  
She texted Boswell afterwards, _is he really this okay?_

 _oh yeah,_ he replied, after a long pause. _he’s always a lot calmer when he’s actually sick for definite_

 _well, as long as you’re both happy,_ she said. _what’s he up to now?_

A longer pause, then the response: _he was filling in the symptom diary on his laptop then he fell asleep on me so I’m typing this one handed._

_cute_

_there are three cats also asleep on the bed. I’m telling you, this is the place to be rn. you virus free folk are just behind the curve._

_possibly literally_

_ha_

“So, I’ve been thinking,” said Harper. “We should marathon all the Hellraiser films. I’d been holding out on suggesting this because as we both know our mutual friend is constitutionally unable to tolerate any amount of dramatic tension, but given he’s on his deathbed that leaves us two, who have stronger stomachs.”

“How do you know I have?” asked Etta, who really couldn’t remember when she’d as-such agreed to Film Club With Harper, but whatever.

“If you imagine I can’t see your screen just because you’re facing away from me and have headphones on, you’re wrong. Also, you have a Shudder subscription. Of course, if you’re too upset about the possible demise of both of your lovers to be able to bear anything but cartoons, that’s fine, I guess. Personally, I just don’t get attached to people, so I’m not really bothered.”

“Uh,” said Etta, “I don’t think they’re that sick, as far as I can tell.”

“Well, sure,” said Harper. “Denial works. Whatever keeps you going. I take it you’re okay with the film choice, then?”

Etta exhaled. “Yeah. Sure. That sounds like a plan.”

As the credits rolled, she took stock. Furious as she was that she was kinda-sorta enjoying spending time with Harper Kaysar, the fact was that it beat the alternative. And she hadn’t lost her mind altogether; he was still fucking awful. But maybe okay to watch and/or talk about horror with.

Childe Harold, perhaps wakened by the music, shook himself off and sprang from the windowsill deftly onto Harper’s lap, where he curled up and closed his eyes again. Harper just stared down at him silently, his messed-up face for once registering only wonderment, without a trace of sarcasm. She wondered whether she should tell Harper that Childe Harold had never done that to a human before that any of them knew about. Maybe not just yet. She’d sit on it for a bit, until she was sure he wasn’t going to be unbearable about it. Still, though. It was pretty impressive.

And right then, finally, she felt as if she understood how she was going to get through this. Acceptance. She felt almost like she was having a kind of spiritual experience, an attainment of true sublimity through the embrace of the grotesque. Not literally; again, she hadn’t lost her mind. But it no longer turned her stomach to be in the same room as him. He didn’t even seem to smell as bad as he usually did. In fact, when she came to think about it, she didn’t seem to be smelling anything at all.

“What are you doing?” asked Harper.

“Nothing,” she said, unscrewing a bottle of nail polish remover. And yeah: nothing. Huh. Possibly psychogenic, or maybe a weird kind of olfactory fatigue from spending so long living in one room with a man for whom a sheetless couch was a step up, in terms of sleeping arrangements. Maybe she’d check in with Joel if it wasn’t back in a couple of days. For now: acceptance. Rolling with it. And with whatever else this crazy year had to offer.

She stretched out her legs, and let herself enjoy the film. 


	14. Childe Harold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Childe Harold** : extremely nervy tuxedo cat, m


	15. TIFU by letting my towels go moldy

Harper sat in his nest of blankets, looking at furniture listings for futons online and trying not to get through a six-pack of Corona (ha-ha) too quickly. The latter was pretty easy, actually; a nice side-effect of going without alcohol for almost a month, probably the longest he’d ever been sober since he started drinking at, what, seventeen? Eighteen? Didn’t matter. The point was, it was a long-ass time. His tolerance was, if not reset to factory default exactly, certainly diminished.

Harper shifted and wrinkled his nose. The nest smelled pretty fuckin’ bad. Maybe it’d gone rank in his absence. Maybe he just noticed the smell more. In any case, there was some kind of mold or fungus growing around the layer of ancient towels at the outermost perimeter, which Harper was almost sure hadn’t been there when he’d left for Joel’s. That wasn’t why he was looking at futons, exactly, although it did provide an extra incentive. Of course, there was always the chance he was being too precious and princessy; maybe it would be healthier, better for him, to learn to peacefully coexist with this bold member of another eukaryote kingdom. Didn’t funguses— fungi?— have a right to life as much as he did, if not more? (Fungi never did anything wrong.) Damn. Maybe Etta had rubbed off on him too much. He had hung out with her a lot after Joel got really sick and started not just coughing, but panting like a man who’d just run up eight flights of stairs, even though he was lying flat on his back in bed. Probably it made him a bad friend, but it was too hard for him to watch Joel’s chest flutter up and down as he struggled for breath. Boswell was with him, supposedly on the mend but still sluggish and a little fevery; that would have to be enough, he’d thought. And in the end he guessed it was.

Etta. Oh, man. Harper took another swig of beer and wrinkled his nose. What he wouldn’t give to have got Etta’s problem. She hadn’t been able to smell or taste anything for three weeks. At first, they’d both thought it was some kind of psychosomatic anxiety type of deal, like at least a third of Joel’s illnesses ended up being, and they’d had fun testing the limits of Etta’s deadened senses. She couldn’t taste hot sauce, pickled beets, raw garlic, or horseradish. She couldn’t smell nail polish remover, permanent marker, the cats’ litterbox, or burning human hair (Harper’s hair, and Etta put the kibosh on experiments after that, because god forbid they have too much fun).

Then, via a Zoom call from the other room and in between those terrible body-shaking dry coughs, Joel had informed them both that no, actually, not being able to smell or taste things was a symptom of Covid-19. “It’s very common, according to anecdotal evidence at least,” he’d said, pushing his glasses up his nose like the huge nerd he was. “I’m fascinated by this particular manifestation of…” and then he was off again on a medical tangent, the gist of which turned out to be, as far as Harper could gather, that basically anything screwy in the human body could, potentially, be a symptom of Covid-19.

Harper wasn’t about to be left out in the living room by himself while everybody else piled into Joel’s bed. So he’d told Joel he figured he had the coronavirus as well, told him about every ache and pain and hand tremor and episode of vertiginous exhaustion or vomiting or hot and cold flashes he’d suffered over the past few days while Joel’s eyes got glittery with excitement and moist with empathy.

Harper knew none of these things were the fault of a virus. He’d been through withdrawal before— not that he got the really serious kind, it was whatever, it was endurable— and it didn’t seem worse or different this time than it had in the past. Still, he reasoned to himself, he’d been exposed, and if he didn’t have it asymptomatically already, he was gonna get it any day now.

Whether Joel took Harper’s account entirely at face value or made a similar private calculation, or was just too sleepy and cough-wracked to argue, by that evening they were all allowed to traverse the apartment as they pleased again. Until Joel started breathing in that messed-up, terrifying way, and couldn’t get out of bed, and, okay, he’d said it wasn’t as bad as it looked and not to call the hospital or anything, and it didn’t last for super long, but Jesus, Harper’d been sure Joel was about to die, and then he would have had to comfort both Boswell and Etta at the funeral, and where the fuck would Boswell live? With him? Harper didn’t have furniture.

Well. He was going to have at least one piece of furniture now, even though Joel was completely back to his usual self, and Boswell was, too, and Joel had texted him that Etta thought her errant senses were finally making a return. Which was good, because Harper knew that he, at least, would jump off the top of the nearest tall parking garage if he thought he’d have to go through his entire life without the ability to enjoy food as anything more than textured pieces of bland, soggy, scentless plant and/or animal material. On the other hand, if she’d stayed taste-blind her whole life, Etta could have joined one of those modern freak shows with, like, the guys who implanted silicone horns underneath their scalp skin and the women who had plastic surgery to make themselves look like anthropomorphic cats and the people who hammered nails up their noses. She could eat garbage and all kinds of really gross shit, literal shit even, as her act. Maybe that’s what Harper would have done in her shoes, now that he really considered the matter. He was sure ugly enough to be a circus freak already.

Harper clicked through more futons. They were all either boring or hideous, but that didn’t matter, he supposed. It was all about feel, and back support. Boswell’s hypothetical future homelessness and his new fungal roommate aside, he was futon-shopping now because…much as he hated to admit it to himself…he’d really, really liked sleeping on Joel’s couch.  
It was plush. He could stretch his legs out. It didn’t give him even a mild skin rash. During the day, he could sit on it and chill. The couch was, as Etta had tactlessly but accurately put it to him at some point, a big step up from sleeping in a pile of old clothes and blankets on a hardwood floor.

(Harper had wondered how Etta knew about his nest. He didn’t have people over, mostly, not even Boswell and Joel; Harper went to others’ apartments to hang out. He pretty much only brought people home for sex, and even though it was almost always drunk sex on his end, he was 99% sure he’d never had sex or come anywhere near having sex with Etta, unless she’d used to be a dude, and she was way too pretty for that. Also, way too short. He’d kind of wanted to ask her, but…nah. Let it be a mystery. Didn’t matter, anyway.)

Harper had half-decided on a $399 futon set with a sturdy, no-frills frame and a thick, squishy-looking behemoth of a mattress— or whatever you called the things that went on top of futons— when his phone buzzed against his ass. He twisted around to fish it from his pocket, and would have spilled Corona all over his laptop were it not for the fact that, in an act of providence, the bottle had somehow become empty while he wasn’t paying attention.

 _Hey,_ said Boswell. _Hope you’re settling back in ok. Etta says tell you she thinks you’re a neat person to hang out with sometimes, but not to let the praise go to your head. Joel says ask you if you’re still getting vertigo, also told me to send you this video of the cats._

The video was 45 seconds of Joel waving a cat dancer around in the air and laughing as Wavy, Wheels, and Potato all tried to chase it. Wavy kept falling over on his side, Wheels couldn’t get off the ground at all for obvious reasons, and Potato looked like a sporadically levitating, fur-covered bowling ball.

Harper felt his face smiling. He’d miss the cats. Too bad he couldn’t get a cat of his own; he knew himself well enough to know he wouldn’t remember to clean its litterbox, or refill its water dish, or do any of the other things responsible people were supposed to do for the animals under their care. Harper had no desire to become a sad-sack, cat-neglecting character in a Weakerthans song.

But Joel’s fucked-up little menagerie was doing great, and Joel and Boswell and Etta were alive and well and probably safe from the virus forever now, and Harper was going to get a futon and maybe convince Etta Musich to let him give her a tattoo someday. Life sucked, that was an eternal and inescapable truth, but it didn’t suck as hard as it might’ve sucked, and that was something.

 _lmao,_ Harper texted back. _Tell them both hey from me. Tell the cats hey, too. No vertigo here. I found the cure, and it’s booze, as usual._

He sent the message and paused for a moment, trying to collect the thoughts he wanted to tell his friend. The thoughts were unruly and kept sliding away from him, colliding into other thoughts, producing new hybrid thoughts that seemed way more interesting and important than whatever had been there before. Late May sunlight fell in pretty, dust-filled stripes across the floorboards and the fungus. Everything was okay, and it was probably going to be okay for the rest of the year— what more could happen besides a fuckin’ pandemic, right? At least almost everyone Harper knew was a responsible weenie, and therefore safe inside.

Harper shook his hair out of his eyes. He grabbed a new beer. He decided to tell Boswell about the futon, and also about the 5G conspiracy theory he was reading up on in a different tab. The smile was still stubbornly stuck on the front of his face, he could feel it. Damn. Something in his chest felt warm and glowy; but then again, he was drunk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick note, because the authors worry about people getting medical information from fanfiction - if you or someone you know get the kind of breathlessness that Joel does, get medical advice ASAP; it could be something you can treat at home, but it might also indicate that you need hospital treatment. He's monitoring his own oxygen saturation and talking to qualified colleagues and teachers; if you don't have access to that, you really need to talk to a doctor or go to A&E or the ER.


	16. Potato

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Potato** : very round orange cat with no tail, f

**Author's Note:**

> Names cheat sheet:  
> Joel Lee -> Joly  
> Louis 'Boswell' Laskin -> Lesgle/Bossuet  
> Etta Musich -> Musichetta  
> Cam B. Ferre -> Combeferre  
> Barry O'Reilly -> Bahorel  
> John 'Jean Prouvaire' Prover -> Jean 'Jehan' Prouvaire  
> Harper Kaysar - > Grantaire (he signs his name with an upper-case R)  
> Flora Réal -> Floréal  
> Francesca "Fish Stew" Stewart -> Matelote  
> Elizabeth "Bunny Stew" Stuart -> Gibelotte  
> Chad Branwell de Courfeyrac the Third -> Courfeyrac. (For some reason he insists on going by Courfeyrac only)  
> Marcus Thankbridge -> Marius Pontmercy  
> Euphrasie Franks -> Cosette Fauchelevant  
> Mike diAngelo -> Enjolras


End file.
